Behavioral Modeling of Household Water Consumption for Effective Water Supply and Management

Abstract

Pakistan is rapidly becoming a water stressed country, thus affecting people’s well-being. Authorities are faced with making drastic water conservation policies towards achieving effective management of available water resources and efficient water supply delivery coupled with responsible demand side management. Due to the lack of modern water metering in Pakistan, water consumption is not being accurately monitored, due to which we are unable to monitor and manage our water resources efficiently. Smart meters are very expensive, installation of smart meters in an urban infrastructure of a country like Pakistan is not possible at this level. To achieve this goal, we propose a hybrid modeling and simulation framework, consisting of: (i) Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) paradigm that takes into account the behavior and characteristics of individuals and (ii) System Dynamics (SD) paradigm that accounts for water flow dynamics. Our approach provides dual-resolution expressiveness suitable for replicating real-world urban infrastructure scenarios. The key objective of the research is to assist authorities to understand and forecast short-term and long-term water consumption through examining varying patterns of water consumption in different climates and thus improving demand side water usage dynamically commensurate with water supply availability and to gain insights of the behavior patterns of water consumption in different areas and improve the performance of the water supply process through demand side management. Furthermore, we propose a low cost solution to smart water meter, we propose to develop an IoT kit that will help in collection of water consumption data at entity level. Once water starts to flow through some entity the water flow sensors will signal the kit and will record the quantity as well as the time for which the water was consumed from that entity. Finally, we will be able to generate the demand of water at household as well as that of an urban area and will be able to validate our model.