Robust Water Supply Chain Network Design under Uncertainty in Capacity

This paper focuses on the capacity uncertainty in water supply chains that occurs when facilities face disruption. A combination of scenario-based two-stage stochastic programming with the min-max robust optimization approach is proposed to optimize the water supply chain network design problem. In the first stage, the decisions are made on locations and capacities of reservoirs and water-treatment plants while recourse decisions including amount of water extraction, amount of water refinement, and consequently amount of water held in reservoirs are made at the second stage. The proposed robust two-stage stochastic programming model can help decision makers consider the impacts of uncertainties and analyze trade-offs between system cost and stability. The literature reveals that most exact methods are not able to tackle the computational complexity of mixed integer non-linear two-stage stochastic problems at large scale. Another contribution of this study is to propose two metaheuristics - a particle swarm optimization (PSO) and a bat algorithm (BA) - to solve the proposed model in large-scale networks efficiently in a reasonable time. The developed model is applied to several hypothetical cases of water resources management systems to evaluate the effectiveness of the model formulation and solution algorithms. Sensitivity analyses are also carried out to analyze the behavior of the model and the robustness approach under parameters variations.