Planning of water supply under uncertainty: The Dead Sea project

The Tourism Development Project (TDP) of the East Coast of the Dead Sea is by far the largest scale tourism project to be undertaken in the Jordan Valley. The TDP seeks to exploit the climatic, historical, archaeological and curative characteristics of the Dead Sea area by providing about 25,000 bed unit for various tourism activities. These activities require a sustainable source of water supply to meet the projected demand. This paper incorporates the uncertainty aspects in the planning of water supply system (WS) for the project using reliability analysis. Variability in components of the WS affects the reliability of the system. Deterministic approach is misleading in this case, it shows that the WS has a factor of safety of about 1.3 for both domestic and irrigation systems. In contrary, the proposed approach indicates that the overall water supply reliability for the best alternative is evaluated to be 75.2% for the domestic system and about 76.1% for the irrigation system. Means and measures for coping with uncertainty in improving the WS performance are briefly addressed in this paper.