DESIGN AND SELECTION OF SAFE WATER SUPPLY SOLUTIONS FOR EMERGING REGIONS - A DEMOGRAPHY BASED DEMAND DRIVEN APPROACH

Due to global climate change, increase in pollution along with reduced quantity of drinking water compared to the total volume of water, the scarcity of potable water is declining gradually. Researchers have become increasingly interested in efficient design of treatment processes, but, there is a lack of research to investigate appropriate, applicable, low cost and simple water treatment processes for underprivileged communities. Providing safe drinking water in these communities is more challenging due to limitation of resources and infrastructure. In this paper we developed a mathematical foundation of Demography Based Demand Driven (DBDD) approach to capture and identify design alternatives (combination of different treatment processes). The developed approach assists to identify, extract, categorize, and compare water related attributes associated with a community and mapped onto source model to identify and select a set of feasible treatment processes. A case study for a community of a rural village in emerging regions of Honduras is modeled and the approach presented in this paper is implemented to design and select feasible service solutions.