Model to Determine the Investment Priority for Telecontrolled Facilities in Sanitary Industry in Chile to Adapt to Climate Change

Abstract

This study proposes a methodology to support decision making when determining the order of investment of telecontrolled facilities in the health industry, contemplating the impacts of climate change. The sanitary industry has been constantly concern in providing greater resilience to the supply of drinking water in face of the effects related to climate change by improving its processes; augmenting the coverage, continuity and quality of drinking water and treatment of sewage water in all Chilean cities. This has had a very favorable impact on the population health and has allowed for a great development of tourism and the agrofood industry; all this, with low rates compared to other countries. The water industry is aware that it is necessary to keep up the speed of investments to maintain service levels and to deal in a timely and effective manner with events that involve customers, due to environment situations, climate change and also the operational and human contingencies of companies in the sector. In this sense, the water industry is adopting new technologies for its processes, with the purpose of making them a factor of service improvement. Currently, the Chilean Sanitary Industry is concerned about the degree of automation and infrastructure requirements, since they are the main critical factors for planning future investments. This document emphasizes the development of a decision model applying the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), to define the order of medium term investments for remote controlled facilities.