No abstract

The existing definition of integrated water resources management (IWRM) promotes a holistic approach to water resources management practice. The IWRM deals with planning, design and operation of complex systems in order to control the quantity, quality, temporal and spatial distribution of water with the main objective of meeting human and ecological needs and providing protection from water disasters. One of the main challenges of IWRM is development of tools for operational implementation of the concept and dynamic coupling of physical and socio-economic components of water resources systems. This research examines the role of simulation in IWRM practices, analyses the advantages and limitations of existing modeling methods, and, as a result, suggests a new generic multi-method modeling framework that has the main goal to capture all structural complexities and interactions within water resources systems. Since traditional modeling methods solely do not provide sufficient support, this framework uses multi-method simulation approach to examine the co-dependence between natural resources and socio-economic environment.Designed framework consists of (i) a spatial database, (ii) a process-based model for representing the physical environment and changing conditions, and (iii) an agent-based model for representing spatially explicit socio-economic environment. The main idea behind multi-agent models is to build virtual complex systems composed of autonomous entities, which operate on local knowledge, possess limited abilities, affect and are affected by local environment, and thus enact the desired global system behavior. Based on the architecture of the generic multi-method modeling framework, an operational model is developed for the Upper Thames River basin, Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Six different experiments combine three climate and two socio-economic scenarios to analyze spatial dynamics of a complex physical-social-economic system. Obtained results present strong dependence between changes in hydrologic regime, in this case surface runoff and groundwater recharge rates, and regional socio-economic activities.

The revitalization of Toronto's waterfront presents the largest urban redevelopment project currently underway in North America. With respect to planning the waterfront's urban water systems (UWS), a number of studies considered a range of criteria in search for sustainable alternatives. However, a comprehensive assessment of the integrated source-drinking-wastewater-stormwater systems over their life cycles has not been developed. According to the main postulates of the integrated approach, hybrid water systems can offer potentially more sustainable solutions than traditional centralized systems. This paper discusses the development process of a decision support tool designed to facilitate evaluation of alternatives based on UWS metabolism concept while addressing some typical challenges of hydroinformatics. This decision-making support tool analyses and compares the sustainability performance of alternative decentralized solutions against a baseline conventional approach on a neighbourhood level. The tool uses a set of criteria, adopted by the large group of stakeholders involved in the development process, that are not typically considered in the decision-making process, such as energy savings, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, climate change resiliency, chemical use, and nutrient recovery. Engineering