Source: CORNELL UNIVERSITY submitted to
DESIGNING ROBUST AND ADAPTIVE WATER MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN REGIONS TRANSITIONING FROM ABUNDANCE TO SCARCITY
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
TERMINATED
Funding Source
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1003481
Grant No.
2014-67003-22076
Project No.
NYC-71417
Proposal No.
2014-05311
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Program Code
A3151
Project Start Date
Aug 15, 2014
Project End Date
Aug 14, 2019
Grant Year
2014
Project Director
Reed, P.
Recipient Organization
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
ITHACA,NY 14853
Performing Department
Civil & Environmental Eng
Non Technical Summary
Current challenges to sustainable water resource use are strongly shaped by the legacies of past development. Historically, regions have tended to develop within an environment of either water abundance or water scarcity, and this has contributed to stark differences in infrastructure, institutions and societal attitudes. The Southeastern US is now facing a transition from water abundance to water scarcity, with population growth, economic expansion, and limitations on new source development all having served to close the gap between supply and demand. Climate change may exacerbate this situation, as two historic droughts have recently demonstrated, especially in combination with changes in land use that are accompanying development. Strategies for sustainable water management in the Western US have received considerable study, resulting in a body of knowledge tailored to Western circumstances, unfortunately the Southeast, and many other formerly water rich regions, are unprepared for the impending transition away from abundance. These regions have institutions, infrastructure and attitudes that are ill-suited for coping with any significant level of water scarcity, as well as a knowledge deficit regarding how to evolve these interlinked management systems. As such, there is a clear need for the development of robust adaptation strategies that will facilitate regional transitions from abundance to scarcity, as well as the scientific, engineering and behavioral knowledge that will underpin them.In this changing environment, communities are being forced to consider a wider range of water management alternatives. When faced with similar challenges, the power sector pursued the "portfolio approach" that included a diverse array of alternative supplies and demand management "assets". Our research team has demonstrated that the portfolio approach has substantial merit in Western US water markets. This research is not directly transferable, however, using an "asset" mix (e.g., water rights, options, and leases) that is not feasible in the Eastern context. The objective of our proposed research is to advance portfolio-based water management in the Southeast by addressing four core knowledge gaps: (1) we must better account for how climate change and LU/LC trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability (hydroclimate knowledge gap); (2) we need to assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives (e.g., conservation vs. financial stability) while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets (portfolio design gap); (3) we must analyze how the current fragmented approach to Southeast water supply management can be modified to create more efficient cooperative regional systems involving multiple communities (regional management gap), and; (4) we must provide a framework for adaptive management of regional systems' tradeoffs as well as their vulnerabilities to assumptions about the future that are deeply uncertain (e.g., demand growth, climate change impacts) (computational synthesis gap). We will bring all these factors together to design robust and adaptive regional water management strategies. A critical and novel part of our project will incorporating constructive learning feedbacks between the research team, water utility personnel, and local government decisionmakers. In this way, management objectives, model-based projections, and evaluations of system vulnerabilities can rapidly evolve with new insights. These feedbacks are fundamental to creating "translational science" and will be made possible through long-term working relationships with regional decisionmakers, yielding strategies that are theoretically sound and implementable.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
30%
Applied
40%
Developmental
30%
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
11202102020100%
Knowledge Area
112 - Watershed Protection and Management;

Subject Of Investigation
0210 - Water resources;

Field Of Science
2020 - Engineering;
Goals / Objectives
Overall Goal:Advance portfolio-based water management in the historically water-rich Southeast US to facilitate a better capability for dealing with the compounding pressures of population growth and increasingly severe droughts that could result from climate change. Many states in the region lack any coherent decisionmaking framework for managing serious shortages, a gaping hole in governance that, combined with population pressures and climatic uncertainties, gives rise to regional water resources conflicts that could lead to significant social and economic disruptions. This research will develop robust adaptation strategies that will facilitate regional transitions from water abundance to water scarcity. This work will be executed collaboratively with National Science Foundation supported collaborators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill.Specific Objectives:(1) Use the Upper Neuse River Basin (1994km2) and a major portion of the Upper Cape Fear Basin, the Jordan Lake watershed (4367 km2), which are adjacent watersheds in central North Carolina as a regional test bed.(2) Assess the long-term regional water supply options for The Research Triangle which straddles the Upper Neuse and Upper Cape Fear basins with a growing population of nearly 2 million and four primary population centers in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill.(3) Better account for how climate change and land-use/land cover (LULC) trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability.(4) Assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets.(5) Analyze how the current fragmented approach to water supply management in the Southeast can be modified to create more efficient cooperative regional systems involving multiple communities.(6) Provide a framework for adaptive management of regional systems that considers tradeoffs as well as vulnerabilities to assumptions about the future that are deeply uncertain (e.g., demand growth, climate change impacts)
Project Methods
Our proposed decision support framework is specifically designed to promote interactions and constructive learning feedbacks between and among our research team and Research Triangle (Triangle) decisionmakers (DMs), with whom we will conduct four learning feedback sessions throughout the project. Characterizing regional hydroclimatic scenarios will be a foundational task that characterizes the natural processes with direct and indirect impacts on surface water flows in the Triangle. Output from hydroclimate SOWs (e.g., streamflow, water demand) will serve as input for developing the individual utility water management portfolios. The relationships for this analysis are represented in a set of integrated water management systems models, already largely developed by the research team. These describe the current state of the Triangle in terms of reservoirs, infrastructure (e.g., treatment facilities, inter-utility connections), utility financial performance (e.g., revenues) and institutional structure (e.g., transfer regulations, environmental flow constraints). Building on these models, we will extend the research teams' previous work applying portfolio theory to the design of Western U.S. water management strategies and will develop portfolios that combine a broad suite of assets appropriate in the East including new infrastructure (e.g., supply, treatment, conveyance), demand management (e.g., pricing, usage restrictions) and conservation technologies (e.g., water reuse). Portfolio strategies will be evaluated in terms of the underlying tradeoffs, interdependencies and vulnerabilities through use of performance metrics that will be elicited from the utilities (e.g., reliability, cost, financial stability). Although a more diverse portfolio can lower expected costs, greater reliance on demand management, particularly during intermittent droughts, can reduce revenues unexpectedly and give rise to financial instability. Evaluating this vulnerability is a novel and important contribution of our proposed research as it influences DMs in many ways, most critically by affecting municipal bond ratings and a utility's all-important "cost of capital". Our exploration of financial failure modes also provides an opportunity to investigate an innovative set of policy/decision levers that can mitigate large swings in revenues (e.g., index insurance). This analysis will be informed via a second learning feedback session. In the first part of this session we will gauge DM preferences over performance metrics, with a particular focus on evaluating attitudes toward risk. In the second part we will introduce the innovative policy/decision levers and analyze how DMs change their preferences once exposed to an explicit rendering of the tradeoffs, interdependencies and vulnerabilities associated with newer strategies.Ultimately, for the Triangle to realize a sustainable vision, independent water system operation must give way to greater regional coordination. Regionalization efforts are likely to begin slowly, and steps to coordinate more efficient use of existing supplies through transfers of treated water among utilities (the only type allowed under current institutions) have just begun. The research team has recently proposed a regional framework for transfer agreements, and the utilities are in the earliest stages of a multi-year negotiation process to formalize these agreements. Consequently, this is a pivotal point in the evolution of Triangle water management, as the utilities take their first concrete (i.e., contractual) step toward regional cooperation. The research team therefore has a unique opportunity to observe and influence DM behavior while contributing a benchmark example with broad applicability across the entire Southeast. Attitudes among DMs toward supply risk will impact the frequency and volume of transfers, which will involve treated water and therefore have considerable implications for infrastructure (e.g., treatment, conveyance). At the same time, financial performance (and related risk attitudes) will impact contract structure, as large spikes in cost resulting from transfers during drought years will be a concern. As a part of this process, we will conduct a third learning feedback session with utility DMs in which they will be exposed to a more complete picture of the tradeoffs under various agreements, as well as their interdependencies (e.g., competition for water transfers), vulnerabilities (e.g., does effective conservation by one utility lower the supply risks of another), the impacts of different policy/decision levers (e.g., financial tools) and key system uncertainties. We will also use the hydrologic model to illustrate counter-factual analyses of how regional coordination via transfers could have mediated the effects of two severe droughts (2002 & 2007-8). Although such transfers may be enough to maintain high supply reliability in the Triangle over the short- to medium-term (to perhaps 2025), in the long-term regional supplies are unlikely to be adequate to meet regional demands, particularly if climate change increases drought severity. The current riparian institutions are completely unprepared to manage this level of "true" scarcity, and will need to evolve in order to manage these periods effectively. Building on theory for cooperative water sharing agreements [43,44], we will develop a theoretical basis for how the different communities in the Triangle might allocate water, both treated and untreated, among communities during periods of scarcity. We will conduct a fourth learning feedback session to analyze how DMs at both the utility and local government levels might enter into these agreements and whether this is consistent with the developed theory.Considerations of hydrology, portfolio design and regional cooperation will be brought together under the Computational Synthesis Platform. This platform will be a critical factor in facilitating rapid and evolving feedbacks between researchers and DMs, combining interactive visualization, sensitivity analysis, and multi-objective optimization to aid the discovery of water portfolio management tradeoffs and key system vulnerabilities. Our focus on coordinated regional decisionmaking is both a defining challenge and contribution of the proposed research. Another major computational focus will be understanding the controlling uncertainties related to relationships between and among inputs and performance metrics in the models, as well as the vulnerabilities involved for Triangle communities given any particular portfolio composition. Our proposed use of global sensitivity analysis has two specific goals related to characterizing model relationships: (1) diagnosing what hydrologic processes/parameters are controlling our projections and (2) identifying key water management factors that yield water supply vulnerabilities.

Progress 08/15/14 to 08/14/19

Outputs
Target Audience:Over the full duration of this project from 2014-2019 our team has engaged a broad range of course activities, trainings, and workshops. Courses of Focus over Full Project Period CEE 5980 Decision Analysis Every Fall semester aspects of our research were integrated into this graduate course exploring decision making for complex engineering and environmental contexts. Enrollments range from 35-65 students representing a mixture of senior undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students from a broad range of departments. The course's students draw from a geographically and demographically diverse student body. The research project has contributed uncertainty analysis tools that were integrated into introductory programming exercises for two homeworks. CEE 3090 Undergraduate Independent Study Developing Software-based Teaching Test Cases for Multiobjective Management of Water Resources In Fall 2014, Abigail Birnbaum, participated in this independent study to learn, test, and evaluate our water resources decision analytics tools. She participated in weekly meetings with Dr. Reed to learn the fundamentals of multiobjective systems analysis and water resources management. The weekly meetings were augmented with the testing and development of software-based teaching tutorials that can be used to illustrate the fundamentals. Regional Workshops and Key Trainings in Sequence by Project Year October 1&2, 2014 Workshop at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr. Reed lead an effort to demonstrate his computational tools and the overall strategy for synthesizing the modeling efforts for this project. The day long workshop was attended by all collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the US Forest Service. In attendance were 4 PhD students involved in this project including one female economics major. August 27-28, 2015 Workshop at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill & Utilities' Briefing Dr. Reed interacted with collaborators in a day long workshop that was attended by all collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the US Forest Service. In attendance were 4 PhD students involved in this project including one female economics major. The meeting also included a representative of the Triangle Region J Council of Governments. This utilities briefing illustrated the importance of conservation and coordinated water transfers to avoid major infrastructure investments through 2025. November 3-5, 2015 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Global Workshop in Delft, Netherlands Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker and workshop tutorials leader to demonstrate the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for a broad international audience of more than 50 government, industrial, and academic attendees. February 6-13, 2016 United Kingdom (UK) Imperial University Decision Making under Uncertainty Workshop Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker sharing the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for an audience of 50 composed of mostly of UK government and industrial attendees. May 5-6, 2016 Workshop at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill & Utilities' Briefing Dr. Reed interacted with collaborators in a day long workshop that was attended by all collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the US Forest Service. In attendance were 4 PhD students involved in this project including one female economics major. The workshop discussed project extensions for 2060 planning efforts to create consistent land-use/land-cover, hydroclimatology, and socio-economic scenarios. November 10, 2016 Framework for Evaluating Alternative Water Supplies: Balancing Cost with Reliability, Resilience, and Sustainability, Water Research Foundation (WRF) Workshop. The water supply planning innovations from this WSC project have resulted in Dr. Reed's invitation to serve as Program Advisory Committee member for WRF project seeking to translate many of the robustness and planning innovations in practice. The workshop had 30 attendees including more than 20 major water utilities, academics, and representatives of major water planning agencies across the U.S. The MORDM framework advanced in this WSC project is strongly shaping what will be a translational report for providing guidance to practitioners. October 8, 2016 Research Triangle Workshop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The WSC team used this workshop day to explore emerging integrations across the risk, demand management, hydrology, land-use/land cover change and climate projection tasks. The core goal of the meeting was to define our final two years of computational experiments that subject infrastructure development pathways to a broad mix of acute and persistent stressors (e.g., droughts, financial shocks, alternative development scenarios, etc.). November 16-17, 2016 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Global Workshop hosted by the World Bank, Washington, D.C. Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker and workshop tutorials leader to demonstrate the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for a broad international audience of more than 50 government, industrial, and academic attendees. October 9-10, 2017 Research Triangle Workshop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The WSC team was hosted by the regional utilities in a briefing of three recent findings: (1) the potential for raw water transfers between Durham and Raleigh to reduce infrastructure investment burdens, (2) an analysis of consumer behavior to water restrictions, and (3) results from our robustness assessments showing the interdependence across the utilities for their water portfolio management risks. November 12-17, 2017 Multi-objective Robust Decision Making Tutorial and Software Training at the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty meeting hosted by Oxford University. Dr. Reed's research group interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The meeting hosted more than 100 participants from around the world interested in new frontiers to support challenging planning problems. March 12-14, 2018 Summer School in Water Resources Systems Analysis, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago. Drs. Reed and Characklis interacted with approximately 50 students from South America as well as international colleagues from a broad range of countries. Our WSC robustness and financial risk tools were featured components of the program. October 5, 2018 Research Triangle Workshop at the Orange Water and Sewage Authority, Carrboro, NC. The WSC team used a Friday workshop day to provide two briefings. Overall the briefings elicited concerns and information related to our infrastructure investment pathways and uncertainty analyses. November 5-7, 2018 Multi-objective Robust Decision Making Tutorial and Software Training at the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty meeting hosted by RAND Corporation. Dr. Reed's research group interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The meeting hosted more than 100 participants from around the world interested in new frontiers to support challenging planning problems. June 11-13, 2019 1st Binational Meeting on Sustainability, Vulnerability, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Merida, Mexico. Dr. Reed's research group was invited to share research insights from this project in terms of robust water supply infrastructure investment and management for newly established consortium of Mexican, Caribbean, and Central American researchers focused adaptation challenges. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Bernardo Trindade, PhD Candidate, Leading Computational Synthesis Tasks & Training. In Years 1-5 at Cornell, Bernardo lead efforts in establishing the project wide computational synthesis framework for assessing tradeoffs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. As part of this effort, the Cornell and UNC-Chapel Hill teams have created direct student-to-student collaborations. Bernardo is working collaboratively with David Gold--Cornell and David Gorelick--UNC. David Gold, PhD Candidate, Computational Synthesis Framework Training. David joined the Cornell team in 2016 and supported the development and application of the overall computational synthesis framework. David is focusing on the stability of cooperative agreements to changing demands and drought extremes based on the relative benefits and regrets that different member utilities experience in the Research Triangle region. David Gorelick, MS Candidate, Financial Risk and Water Supply Instruments. David joined the UNC team in Fall 2015 and is being collaboratively trained by the Cornell team this year. He is looking at new collaborative water transfer schemes between Raleigh and Durham who represent the most challenged of the Research Triangle utilities. The goal is to diffuse competition for sources of water while aiding each city to become more robust. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Over the duration of this Dr. Reed participated in the following suite of workshops, panels, or seminars that have broad audiences that include other technical disciplines and in many instances the general public. Year 1 RAND Corporation, Second Annual Workshop on Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty, November 18-19, 2014, Santa Monica, CA. Current Challenges in Computing Conference (C-Cubed): Decision Sciences, Organized by RAND Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, December 1-3, 2014. University of Wisconsin at Madison Weston Roundtable Seminar Series on Sustainability, March 26, 2015, Madison, WI. Cornell University Sesquicentennial Celebration Weekend Panel, Is the Future Secure and Sustainable?, April 25, 2015, Ithaca, NY. Worldbank, Resilient Solutions for Long Run Climate Change, May 11, 2015, Washington, DC. Year 2 Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, iSEE Congress 2015: Water Planet, Water Crises? Meeting the World's Water-Food-Energy Needs Sustainably, Plenary Speaker, Urbana-Champaign, IL., September 15, 2015. Global Institute for Water Security Seminar Speaker, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, October 2, 2015. RAND Corporation Seminar Speaker, Santa Monica, CA, October 16, 2015. 3rd Annual Meeting on Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty, Delft Technical University, Plenary Speaker, Delft, Netherlands, November 3, 2015. Denver Water Integrated Resources Planning Seminar, Invited Speaker, Denver, CO, November 23, 2015. Oxford University, Water Network Evening Seminar Series, Invited Speaker, Oxford, UK, February 8, 2016. Imperial University, Decision Making Under Uncertainty Workshop, Plenary Speaker, February 10-11, 2016. Bristol University, Water Resources Engineering Seminar Series, Invited Speaker, Bristol, UK, February 12, 2016. Tampa Bay Water Authority, Invited Speaker, Tampa, FL, March 23, 2016. Colorado Water Conservation Board, Invited Speaker, Denver, CO, May 13, 2016. Argonne National Laboratory, Environmental Science Division, Invited Speaker, Chicago, IL., July 11, 2016. Year 3 Frontiers in Geosciences Speaker, Los Alamos National Lab, NM, August 1, 2016. Smart Systems for Water Management Symposium, Plenary Speaker, Monte Verita, Switzerland, August 24, 2016. Symposium of Search-Based Software Engineering, Plenary Speaker, Raleigh, NC, October 8, 2016. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU 2016), Plenary Speaker & Invited Interactive Tutorial Session Organizer, World Bank, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2016. European Geophysical Union Spring 2017 Assembly, Invited Speaker, Session HS8.1.3 Model Uncertainties, Parameter Estimation, and Data Assimilation in Surface and Subsurface Hydrology, Vienna, Austria, April 25, 2017. BEACON Center Seminar Series, Michigan State University, April 13, 2017. International Workshop on Coupled Human Natural Systems, Invited Speaker, Tübingen University, Germany, May 30, 2017. Year 4 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU 2016), Interactive Tutorial Session, Oxford University, UK, November 13, 2017. Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Group Seminar Series, University of New South Wales, Australia, February 19-21, 2018. Fenner School of Environment and Society Seminar Series, Australian National University, February 22, 2018. Water Systems Seminar Series, The University of Adelaide, February 23, 2018. Water Systems Summer School, Invited Speaker and Instructor, Universidad de Chile, March 12-14, 2018. Decision Systems Seminar Series, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, March 22, 2018. Year 5 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU 2016), Interactive Tutorial Session, Culver City, CA, November 5, 2018. Colloquium on Complex Adaptive Infrastructure Systems, Technical University at Delft, Netherlands, January 14, 2019. Environmental and Water Resources Systems Seminar, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, February 27, 2019. Seminar at the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE), Princeton University, March 25, 2019. First Binational Meeting on Sustainability, Vulnerability, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Merida, Mexico, June 11-13, 2019. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Accomplishments Improving Robustness and Clarifying Vulnerabilities for Co-Evolving Infrastructure Systems: This study contributes the Deep Uncertainty (DU) Pathways framework for bridging long-term water supply infrastructure investments and improved short-term water portfolio management (e.g., restrictions, water transfers, financial instruments, etc.) to yield robust regional water supplies. Bridging infrastructure investments and short-term water portfolio management is a difficult task because of the potentially large number of decisions, the decadal timescales involved, and the significant uncertainties inherent to the problem. The DU Pathways framework combines flexible risk-of-failure (ROF) decision rules, dynamic adaptive policy pathways concepts, and a careful consideration time-evolving information feedbacks to yield management conditioned infrastructure pathways for regions. The DU Pathways' framework has been developed to carefully consider multi-actor regional contexts with the goal of aiding stakeholders in discovering pathway policies that attain high performance levels across challenging, deeply uncertain futures and to guide robustness compromises that may be necessary between regional actors. The adaptivity of temporally consistent short-term and long-term ROF rules allows utilities using the DU Pathways framework to hedge against a wide range of well-characterized and deep uncertainties, while maintaining acceptable performance across a broad array of challenging futures. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Deeply Uncertain Pathways: Integrated Multi-City Regional Water Supply Infrastructure Investment and Portfolio Management." (In-Preparation). Open-source Framework to Support Robust Water Infrastructure Investment Pathways: The growing access to, and reduced cost of, computing power in recent years has promoted rapid development and application of advanced stochastic simulation frameworks. This work introduces the WaterPaths model: an open source simulation framework designed to simulate stochastic risk and demand-based sequencing of long-term regional water infrastructure investments while simultaneously considering key short term operational decisions (e.g., use restrictions, transfers, financial instruments, etc), bridging the gap between weekly management and yearly planning decision making for water utility companies. WaterPaths' code is designed to be easily expandable to allow researchers in the field of water resources systems to implement and test new conservation and financial mitigation strategies, such as schemes for allocating water transfers among regional utilities and different ways of structuring drought insurance policies. Besides being used to advance new portfolio planning innovations, the framework can also be used as a benchmark regional planning problem for testing new robustness frameworks and optimization algorithms for water systems engineering problems, or to get insights on particular systems of interest. The code, written in C++, is capable of multi-platform parallelization strategies (i.e., personal computers, cloud, or large clusters) enabling scalable ensemble-based exploratory analyses. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Gold, D., and Characklis, G., "WaterPaths: a new open source stochastic urban water portfolio simulation framework." (In-Preparation). Characterizing How Land-Use and Climate Change Shape Planning and Management: Climate and landcover change strongly shape water resources management, but understanding their joint impacts is extremely challenging. Consequently, there is limited research of their integrated effects on water supply systems, and even fewer studies that rigorously account for infrastructure investment and management interventions. We utilize eco-hydrologic modeling to generate watershed outflows under scenarios of climate and landcover change, which in turn drive modeled water utility-level decision-making for the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. In the Triangle region, landcover and climate change are both likely to increase water supply availability (reservoir inflows) individually and in tandem. However, improvements from water supply increases are not uniform across management system performance indicators of reliability, conservation implementation frequency (i.e., water use restrictions), and infrastructure investment. Utility decisions influence the impact of hydrologic change through both short-term (e.g., use restrictions, water transfers) as well as longer-term infrastructure investment actions, in some cases offsetting the beneficial effects of additional water supply. Timing and sequencing of infrastructure development are strongly sensitive to climate and land-use change as captured by their impacts on utility performance outcomes. This work underscores the need to consider adaptive management system responses and decision relevant performance measures when determining the impacts of hydrologic change on water availability. Related Citation: Gorelick, D., Lin, L., Zeff, H.B., Kim, Y., Vose, J., Coulston, J., Wear, D., Band, L., Reed, P. M., and Characklis, G. W., "Accounting for adaptive water supply management when quantifying climate and landcover change vulnerability.", Water Resources Research, (In-Review). Exploring the Stability of Cooperative Regional Planning Coalitions: Regional cooperation among water utilities can improve the robustness of urban water supply portfolios to deeply uncertain future conditions such as those caused by climate change or population growth. Coordination mechanisms such as coordinated demand management, water transfers, and shared infrastructure, can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and delay the need for new infrastructure investments. Regionalization does however come at a cost. Regionally coordinated water supply plans may be vulnerable to any emerging instabilities in the regional coalition. If one or more regional actors does not cooperate or follow the required regional actions in a time of crisis, the overall system performance may degrade. Furthermore, when crafting regional water supply portfolios, decision makers must choose a framework for measuring the performance of regional policies based on the evaluation of the objective values for each individual actor. Regional evaluations may inherently favor one actor's interests over those of another. This work focuses on four interconnected water utilities in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina for which robust regional water supply portfolios have previously been designed using multi-objective optimization to maximize the robustness of the worst performing utility across several objectives. This study 1) examines the sensitivity of portfolio performance to deviations from prescribed actions by individual utilities, 2) quantifies the implications of the regional formulation used to evaluate robustness for the portfolio performance of each individual utility and 3) elucidates the inherent regional tensions and conflicts that exist between utilities under this regionalization scheme through visual diagnostics of the system under simulated drought scenarios. Results of this analysis will help inform the creation of future regional water supply portfolios and provide insight into the nature of multi-actor water supply systems. Related Citation: Gold, D., Reed, P.M., Trindade, B.C., and Characklis, G.W., "Conflicts in Coalitions: Navigating multi-city robustness conflicts to discover cooperative safe operating spaces for regional water supply portfolios.", Water Resources Research, (In-Revision).

Publications


    Progress 08/15/18 to 08/14/19

    Outputs
    Target Audience:Project Year 5 encompasses August 2018-August 2019 where I have integrated the methods and results from this research into three graduate courses, the continued supervision of 2 PhDs, as well as two overall workshops including one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a another in Merida, Mexico. The results from our Research Triangle efforts continue to garner broad interest by water utilities both nationally and globally. Our team's emerging efforts are quickly translating the tools and results of this project into professional practice. Each of these activities is discussed in more detail below. CEE 5980 Decision Analysis Graduate course exploring decision making for complex engineering and environmental contexts. In the Fall 2018, the course was presented to 50 students representing a mixture of senior undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students from a broad range of departments. The course's students draw from a geographically and demographically diverse student body. As part of this most recent course, the Many-Objective Robust Decision Making tools used in this research project were introduced to the students as foundational resources for their original course projects. The tools allowed for a collaborative decision making experiment where students were allowed to formulate management strategies and then evaluate how well they performance given severe test case uncertainties. CEE 6200 Water Resources Systems Engineering In Spring 2019, Dr. Reed offered a course to 14 MS and PhD students that deals with the growing concerns about how "change" (climate, land-use, population, etc.) will strain our water resources is motivating the need for the next generation of professionals that can innovate the planning and management of these systems. Course topics build on the legacy of research in the water resources systems area and seek to provide a new generation of planners with an enhanced ability to discover and negotiate the highly uncertain tradeoffs we face in balancing the water resources demands of the future. Students will be encouraged to explore what sustainable water management means given conflicting demands from renewable energy systems, ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The specific insights and urban water supply portfolio planning tools developed in support of this Water Sustainability & Climate project were integrated into the curriculum through computer exercises and a comprehensive project. Aiding the dissemination and value of these tools the course students interacted with David Gold and Bernardo Trindade in completing tasks that will help support our next Research Triangle planning efforts. CEE 6660 Multiobjective Systems Engineering Under Uncertainty In Spring 2019, Dr. Reed offered a course to 5 PhD students and several auditing guests that exploits programming case studies and projects drawn from the disciplines of participating students to introduce the multiobjective design tools that underlie many of the engineering design under uncertainty innovations of this WSC project. Beyond the focus on multiobjective optimization, the course guided students to explore relevant research related to constructive decision-aiding theory, decision-biases identified in the behavioral economics literature related to risk, and recent advances in visual analytics that have been demonstrated to enhance design processes. Offering the course has had the benefit of expanding the insights from this project to other climate adaptation and mitigation applications (e.g., energy microgrids, decarbonizing transportation, financial risks in hydropower, etc.). October 5, 2018 Research Triangle Workshop at the Orange Water and Sewage Authority, Carrboro, NC. The WSC team used a Friday workshop day to provide two briefings. The first briefing provided a summary of key results for research project to date to the broader group of approximately 15 water utilities that compose the Jordan Lake Partnership. Key technical insights included the importance of water transfers, financial risk instruments, and the potential for coordinated infrastructure investments. The second and more detailed meeting was with Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and OWASA. This second briefing focused on our most recent research results and planned efforts integrating concerns across the risk, demand management, hydrology, land-use/land cover change and climate projection areas of our WSC. Overall the second briefing was used to elicit concerns and information related to our infrastructure investment pathways and uncertainty analyses. November 5-7, 2018 Multi-objective Robust Decision Making Tutorial and Software Training at the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty meeting hosted by RAND Corporation. Dr. Reed's research group interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The meeting hosted more than 100 participants from around the world interested in new frontiers to support challenging planning problems. Another significant focus of the training and workshop overall included broad discussions on needed innovations for consistent infrastructure pathway planning in complex systems such as The Research Triangle in NC. June 11-13, 2019 1st Binational Meeting on Sustainability, Vulnerability, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Merida, Mexico. Dr. Reed's research group was invited to share research insights from this project in terms of robust water supply infrastructure investment and management for newly established consortium of Mexican, Caribbean, and Central American researchers focused adaptation challenges. The researchers in the consortium are drawn from governmental agencies, academia, non-governmental organizations, and industry. The meeting had particularly strong focus on emerging frontiers for decision support and managing deeply uncertain pressures associated with climate change. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Bernardo Trindade, PhD Candidate, Leading Computational Synthesis Tasks & Training. In Year 5 at Cornell, Bernardo continues to lead efforts in establishing the project wide computational synthesis framework for assessing tradeoffs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. As part of this effort, the Cornell and UNC-Chapel Hill teams have created direct student-to-student collaborations. Bernardo is working collaboratively with David Gold--Cornell and David Gorelick--UNC. David Gold, PhD Candidate, Computational Synthesis Framework Training. David joined the Cornell team in 2016 and is supporting the development and application of the overall computational synthesis framework. David is focusing on the stability of cooperative agreements to changing demands and drought extremes based on the relative benefits and regrets that different member utilities experience in the Research Triangle region. David Gorelick, MS Candidate, Financial Risk and Water Supply Instruments. David joined the UNC team in Fall 2015 and is being collaboratively trained by the Cornell team this year. He is looking at new collaborative water transfer schemes between Raleigh and Durham who represent the most challenged of the Research Triangle utilities. The goal is to diffuse competition for sources of water while aiding each city to become more robust. As discussed in the Target Audience section of this report, the computational synthesis framework has been featured in two major training workshops, international visits seeking to build collaboration, and two graduate courses. November 5-7, 2018 Multi-objective Robust Decision Making Tutorial and Software Training at the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty meeting hosted by RAND Corporation. Dr. Reed's research group interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The meeting hosted more than 100 participants from around the world interested in new frontiers to support challenging planning problems. Another significant focus of the training and workshop overall included broad discussions on needed innovations for consistent infrastructure pathway planning in complex systems such as The Research Triangle in NC. June 11-13, 2019 1st Binational Meeting on Sustainability, Vulnerability, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Merida, Mexico. Dr. Reed's research group was invited to share research insights from this project in terms of robust water supply infrastructure investment and management for newly established consortium of Mexican, Caribbean, and Central American researchers focused adaptation challenges. The researchers in the consortium are drawn from governmental agencies, academia, non-governmental organizations, and industry. The meeting had particularly strong focus on emerging frontiers for decision support and managing deeply uncertain pressures associated with climate change. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Dr. Reed participated in the following suite of workshops, panels, or seminars that have broad audiences that include other technical disciplines and in many instances the general public. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU 2016), Interactive Tutorial Session, Culver City, CA, November 5, 2018. Colloquium on Complex Adaptive Infrastructure Systems, Technical University at Delft, Netherlands, January 14, 2019. Environmental and Water Resources Systems Seminar, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, February 27, 2019. Seminar at the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE), Princeton University, March 25, 2019. First Binational Meeting on Sustainability, Vulnerability, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Merida, Mexico, June 11-13, 2019. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

    Impacts
    What was accomplished under these goals? Improving Robustness and Clarifying Vulnerabilities for Co-Evolving Infrastructure Systems: This study contributes the Deep Uncertainty (DU) Pathways framework for bridging long-term water supply infrastructure investments and improved short-term water portfolio management (e.g., restrictions, water transfers, financial instruments, etc.) to yield robust regional water supplies. Bridging infrastructure investments and short-term water portfolio management is a difficult task because of the potentially large number of decisions, the decadal timescales involved, and the significant uncertainties inherent to the problem. The DU Pathways' framework has been developed to carefully consider multi-actor regional contexts with the goal of aiding stakeholders in discovering pathway policies that attain high performance levels across challenging, deeply uncertain futures and to guide robustness compromises that may be necessary between regional actors. The adaptivity of temporally consistent short-term and long-term ROF rules allows utilities using the DU Pathways framework to hedge against a wide range of well-characterized and deep uncertainties, while maintaining acceptable performance across a broad array of challenging futures. The framework also provides policy-tailored insights about the appropriateness of individual infrastructure options and about which sources of uncertainty should be closely monitored to ensure timely policy adaptation to scenarios under which the implemented policy does not meet performance expectations. The DU Pathways approach is demonstrated here using the Research Triangle region in North Carolina by exploring the infrastructure investment and water portfolio management options for four adjacent utilities, twenty sources of uncertainty, and a planning horizon of forty-five years. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Deeply Uncertain Pathways: Integrated Multi-City Regional Water Supply Infrastructure Investment and Portfolio Management." (In-Preparation). Open-source Framework to Support Robust Water Infrastructure Investment Pathways: The growing access to, and reduced cost of, computing power in recent years has promoted rapid development and application of advanced stochastic simulation frameworks. This work introduces the WaterPaths model: an open source simulation framework designed to simulate stochastic risk and demand-based sequencing of long-term regional water infrastructure investments while simultaneously considering key short term operational decisions (e.g., use restrictions, transfers, financial instruments, etc), bridging the gap between weekly management and yearly planning decision making for water utility companies. WaterPaths' code is designed to be easily expandable to allow researchers in the field of water resources systems to implement and test new conservation and financial mitigation strategies, such as schemes for allocating water transfers among regional utilities and different ways of structuring drought insurance policies. Besides being used to advance new portfolio planning innovations, the framework can also be used as a benchmark regional planning problem for testing new robustness frameworks and optimization algorithms for water systems engineering problems, or to get insights on particular systems of interest. The code, written in C++, is capable of multi-platform parallelization strategies (i.e., personal computers, cloud, or large clusters) enabling scalable ensemble-based exploratory analyses. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Gold, D., and Characklis, G., "WaterPaths: a new open source stochastic urban water portfolio simulation framework." (In-Preparation). Characterizing How Land-Use and Climate Change Shape Planning and Management: Climate and landcover change strongly shape water resources management, but understanding their joint impacts is extremely challenging. Consequently, there is limited research of their integrated effects on water supply systems, and even fewer studies that rigorously account for infrastructure investment and management interventions. We utilize eco-hydrologic modeling to generate watershed outflows under scenarios of climate and landcover change, which in turn drive modeled water utility-level decision-making for the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. In the Triangle region, landcover and climate change are both likely to increase water supply availability (reservoir inflows) individually and in tandem. However, improvements from water supply increases are not uniform across management system performance indicators of reliability, conservation implementation frequency (i.e., water use restrictions), and infrastructure investment. Utility decisions influence the impact of hydrologic change through both short-term (e.g., use restrictions, water transfers) as well as longer-term infrastructure investment actions, in some cases offsetting the beneficial effects of additional water supply. Timing and sequencing of infrastructure development are strongly sensitive to climate and land-use change as captured by their impacts on utility performance outcomes. Related Citation: Gorelick, D., Lin, L., Zeff, H.B., Kim, Y., Vose, J., Coulston, J., Wear, D., Band, L., Reed, P. M., and Characklis, G. W., "Accounting for adaptive water supply management when quantifying climate and landcover change vulnerability.", Water Resources Research, (In-Review). Exploring the Stability of Cooperative Regional Planning Coalitions: Regional cooperation among water utilities can improve the robustness of urban water supply portfolios to deeply uncertain future conditions such as those caused by climate change or population growth. Coordination mechanisms such as coordinated demand management, water transfers, and shared infrastructure, can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and delay the need for new infrastructure investments. Regionalization does however come at a cost. Regionally coordinated water supply plans may be vulnerable to any emerging instabilities in the regional coalition. If one or more regional actors does not cooperate or follow the required regional actions in a time of crisis, the overall system performance may degrade. Furthermore, when crafting regional water supply portfolios, decision makers must choose a framework for measuring the performance of regional policies based on the evaluation of the objective values for each individual actor. Regional evaluations may inherently favor one actor's interests over those of another. This work focuses on four interconnected water utilities in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina for which robust regional water supply portfolios have previously been designed using multi-objective optimization to maximize the robustness of the worst performing utility across several objectives. This study 1) examines the sensitivity of portfolio performance to deviations from prescribed actions by individual utilities, 2) quantifies the implications of the regional formulation used to evaluate robustness for the portfolio performance of each individual utility and 3) elucidates the inherent regional tensions and conflicts that exist between utilities under this regionalization scheme through visual diagnostics of the system under simulated drought scenarios. Related Citation: Gold, D., Reed, P.M., Trindade, B.C., and Characklis, G.W., "Conflicts in Coalitions: Navigating multi-city robustness conflicts to discover cooperative safe operating spaces for regional water supply portfolios", Water Resources Research, (In-Revision).

    Publications

    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Gorelick, D., Zeff, H., Characklis, G., and Reed, P. M., Integrating raw water transfers into an Eastern United States management context., ASCE Journal Water Resources Planning & Management, v144, no. 9, DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000966, 05018012, 2018.
    • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Bonzanigo, Laura; Rozenberg, Julie; Felter, Gregory Calner; Lempert, Robert J.; Reed, Patrick Michael. 2018. Building the Resilience of WSS Utilities to Climate Change and Other Threats : A Road Map (English). Washington, D.C. : World Bank Group.
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2019 Citation: Gold, D., Reed, P.M., Trindade, B.C., and Characklis, G.W., Conflicts in Coalitions: Navigating multi-city robustness conflicts to discover cooperative safe operating spaces for regional water supply portfolios., Water Resources Research, (In-Revision).
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2019 Citation: Gorelick, D., Lin, L., Zeff, H.B., Kim, Y., Vose, J., Coulston, J., Wear, D., Band, L., Reed, P. M., and Characklis, G. W., Accounting for adaptive water supply management when quantifying climate and landcover change vulnerability., Water Resources Research, (In-Review).


    Progress 08/15/17 to 08/14/18

    Outputs
    Target Audience:Project Year 4 encompasses August 2017-August 2018 where I have integrated the methods and results from this research into two graduate courses, continue supervise 2 PhDs, two overall project workshops including one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and another with the Research Triangle water utilities. Additionally, the results from our Research Triangle efforts continue to garner broad interest by water utilities both nationally and globally. Moreover, emerging efforts are quickly translating the tools and results of this project into professional practice. Consequently, as part of this most recent reporting year Dr. Reed also participated in international workshops, training, and seminars at Oxford University, the University of Chile, Arizona State University, and several Australian universities. Each of these activities is discussed in more detail below. CEE 5980 Decision Analysis Graduate course exploring decision making for complex engineering and environmental contexts. In the Fall 2017 the course was presented to 47 students representing a mixture of senior undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students from a broad range of departments. The course's students draw from a geographically and demographically diverse student body. As part of this most recent course, the Many-Objective Robust Decision Making tools used in this research project were introduced to the students as foundational resources for their original course projects. The tools allowed for a collaborative decision making experiment where students were allowed to formulate management strategies and then evaluate how well they performance given severe test case uncertainties. CEE 6200 Water Resources Systems Engineering Dr. Reed offered a course that deals with the growing concerns about how "change" (climate, land-use, population, etc.) will strain our water resources is motivating the need for the next generation of professionals that can innovate the planning and management of these systems. Course topics build on the legacy of research in the water resources systems area and seek to provide a new generation of planners with an enhanced ability to discover and negotiate the highly uncertain tradeoffs we face in balancing the water resources demands of the future. Students will be encouraged to explore what sustainable water management means given conflicting demands from renewable energy systems, ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The specific insights and urban water supply portfolio planning tools developed in support of this Water Sustainability & Climate project were integrated into the curriculum through computer exercises and a comprehensive project. Aiding the dissemination and value of these tools the course students interacted with David Gold in completing tasks that will help support our next Research Triangle planning efforts. October 9-10, 2017 Research Triangle Workshop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The WSC team used a Monday (10/9) workshop day to explore emerging integrations across the risk, demand management, hydrology, land-use/land cover change and climate projection tasks. The core goal of the meeting was to define our final two years of computational experiments that subject infrastructure development pathways to a broad mix of acute and persistent stressors (e.g., droughts, financial shocks, alternative development scenarios, etc.). On Tuesday (10/10), our team was hosted by the regional utilities in a briefing of three recent findings: (1) the potential for raw water transfers between Durham and Raleigh to reduce infrastructure investment burdens, (2) an analysis of consumer behavior to water restrictions, and (3) results from our robustness assessments showing the interdependence across the utilities for their water portfolio management risks. November 12-17, 2017 Multi-objective Robust Decision Making Tutorial and Software Training at the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty meeting hosted by Oxford University. Dr. Reed's research group interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The meeting hosted more than 100 participants from around the world interested in new frontiers to support challenging planning problems. Another significant focus of the training and workshop overall included broad discussions on needed innovations for consistent infrastructure pathway planning in complex systems such as The Research Triangle in NC. February 19-23, 2018 Seminars and collaborative trainings at three Australian universities. The water supply planning innovations from this WSC project have resulted in Dr. Reed's invitation to visit the University of New South Wales, Australian National University, and the University of Adelaide to share research results and participate in outreach meetings where the students were given a detailed introduction to the underlying theory and application of the component tools in the Many-Objective Robust Decision Making framework. Interest in the tools and our WSC results are very high in Australia given their severe water planning challenges. March 12-14, 2018 Summer School in Water Resources Systems Analysis, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago. Drs. Reed and Characklis interacted with approximately 50 students from South America as well as international colleagues from a broad range of countries. Our WSC robustness and financial risk tools were featured components of the program. This Summer School comprised of six short-courses which cover many aspects of decision making in water resources systems under uncertainty, with emphasis on optimization and economic tools to better represent and balance the variety of objectives (economic, social, and environmental) involved. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Bernardo Trindade, PhD Candidate, Leading Computational Synthesis Tasks & Training. In Year 4 at Cornell, Bernardo continues to lead efforts in establishing the project wide computational synthesis framework for assessing tradeoffs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. As part of this effort, the Cornell and UNC-Chapel Hill teams have created direct student-to-student collaborations. Bernardo is working collaboratively with Dr. Harrison Zeff from UNC and helping train two new students (David Gold--Cornell; David Gorelick--UNC). David Gold, PhD Candidate, Computational Synthesis Framework Training. David joined the Cornell team in 2016 and is supporting the development and application of the overall computational synthesis framework. David is focusing on the stability of cooperative agreements to changing demands and drought extremes based on the relative benefits and regrets that different member utilities experience in the Research Triangle region. David Gorelick, MS Candidate, Financial Risk and Water Supply Instruments. David joined the UNC team in Fall 2015 and is being collaboratively trained by the Cornell team this year. He is looking at new collaborative water transfer schemes between Raleigh and Durham who represent the most challenged of the Research Triangle utilities. The goal is to diffuse competition for sources of water while aiding each city to become more robust. As discussed in the Target Audience section of this report, the computational synthesis framework has been featured in two major training workshops, international visits seeking to build collaborationd and in CEE 6200. November 12-17, 2017 Multi-objective Robust Decision Making Tutorial and Software Training at the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty meeting hosted by Oxford University. Dr. Reed's research group interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The meeting hosted more than 100 participants from around the world interested in new frontiers to support challenging planning problems. February 19-23, 2018 Seminars and collaborative trainings at three Australian universities. The water supply planning innovations from this WSC project have resulted in Dr. Reed's invitation to visit the University of New South Wales, Australian National University, and the University of Adelaide to share research results and participate in outreach meetings. March 12-14, 2018 Summer School in Water Resources Systems Analysis, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago. Drs. Reed and Characklis interacted with approximately 50 students from South America as well as international colleagues from a broad range of countries. Our WSC robustness and financial risk tools were featured components of the program. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Dr. Reed participated in the following suite of workshops, panels, or seminars that have broad audiences that include other technical disciplines and in many instances the general public. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU 2016), Interactive Tutorial Session, Oxford University, UK, November 13, 2017. Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Group Seminar Series, University of New South Wales, Australia, February 19-21, 2018. Fenner School of Environment and Society Seminar Series, Australian National University, February 22, 2018. Water Systems Seminar Series, The University of Adelaide, February 23, 2018. Water Systems Summer School, Invited Speaker and Instructor, Universidad de Chile, March 12-14, 2018. Decision Systems Seminar Series, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, March 22, 2018. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?(1) Use the Upper Neuse River Basin (1994km2) and a major portion of the Upper Cape Fear Basin, the Jordan Lake watershed (4367 km2), which are adjacent watersheds in central North Carolina as a regional test bed. Work to better account for how climate change and land-use/land cover (LULC) trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability. Year 5 Plan: The UNC-Chapel Hill, US Forest Service and Cornell teams are actively working to develop an integrated workflow that will allow LU/LC, vegetation dynamics, and climate change scenarios to be integrated into the infrastructure modeling. The Cornell team's role will be to help the UNC-Chapel Hill collaborators in evaluating the sensitivities and key uncertainties in the projections. This work is non-trivial and has been building as a synthesis activity over the last several years. (2) Assess the long-term regional water supply options for The Research Triangle which straddles the Upper Neuse and Upper Cape Fear basins with a growing population of nearly 2 million and four primary population centers in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill. Year 5 Plan: A core task for the next project year builds off of the baseline for time adaptive and state-dependent infrastructure options in the Research Triangle developed in Year 4. This work will explore the robustness of integrated risk-based pathways combining infrastructure, conservation, water transfers, and financial risk instruments. As of Summer 2018, a significant amount of the underlying computational synthesis tools needed for this analysis have been developed. This will be the first study to explore the robustness of multiple cities that are using dynamic risk-of-failure (ROF) planning triggers. A challenge and unique contribution of this work is that the ROF-based pathways more effectively use scenario information (e.g., supply capacity and demand dynamics) to develop highly adaptive, probabilistic infrastructure pathways. (3) Assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets. Year 5 Plan: As discussed above, our team will work to demonstrate the value of cooperation via water transfers, coordinated demand management, and shared investments in infrastructure. A challenge that emerges with cooperation is that each of the 4 cities have their own unique pressures and risk profiles. Consequently, our team has discovered that the individual risk aversion of member cities and their efforts to maximize their individual robustness can have significantly negative effects on other regional stakeholders. The Cornell team is going to lead a more detailed investigation of our ability to understand and ameliorate the robustness tradeoffs between the member cities of Triangle Region. We will work through interactive sessions with the utilities to characterize their desired performance requirements and the resulting individual as regional robustness effects.

    Impacts
    What was accomplished under these goals? Time Adaptive Robustness for Co-Evolving Infrastructure Systems: Emerging water scarcity concerns in southeastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors. It has been shown that regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that do not rely on building new infrastructure can be used by water utilities to mitigate the effects of water scarcity and financial instability, the latter caused by conservation and transfers, in the near future. However, in the longer term, infrastructure expansion is likely to be necessary to address rising water demand/availability ratios which may result from changes in deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, and the increasing risks for sustained regional droughts. This research broadens the assessment of robustness to better resolve time evolving infrastructure adaptation pathways for the North Carolina Research Triangle. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Time evolving multi-city dependencies and robustness tradeoffs for risk-based portfolios of conservation, transfers, and cooperative water supply infrastructure development." (In-Preparation). Increasing the Robustness and Resilience of Water Infrastructure Investment Pathways: There is a direct need for flexible and computationally scalable simulation--optimization frameworks capable of exploring water supply pathways. This must include the broad array of candidate short term management actions, long term infrastructure investments, and uncertain stressors in coupled human-natural systems. The contributions of this work extend beyond computational algorithms. The Research Triangle management model that is core to this work requires detailed human system data (reservoir rules, finances, demands, rules for restriction, conditions for transfer, pricing, etc.) as well as natural system data (multiple ensembles of streamflows, evaporation, etc.). Having sufficient abstractions of the human systems strongly constrains the scope of candidate management actions (i.e., transfers, restrictions, and financial instruments) that can be simulated and explored under deep uncertainty. Densely populated urban regions with multiple utilities must be carefully abstracted as coupled human--natural systems. A multitude of factors fundamentally shape the degree to which droughts impact water supplies (e.g., magnitude and duration of rainfall deficits, coordination of crisis management, water treatment and conveyance capacities, population growth, financial stability, infrastructure maintenance, etc.). Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Many-objective Optimization Under Deep Uncertainty to Improve the Robustness and Resilience of Regional Water Supply Investment Pathways." (In-Preparation). Exploring the Stability of Cooperative Regional Planning Coalitions: This study 1) examines the sensitivity of portfolio performance to deviations from prescribed actions by individual utilities, 2) quantifies the implications of the regional formulation used to evaluate robustness for the portfolio performance of each individual utility and 3) elucidates the inherent regional tensions and conflicts that exist between utilities under this regionalization scheme through visual diagnostics of the system under simulated drought scenarios. Results of this analysis will help inform the creation of future regional water supply portfolios and provide insight into the nature of multi-actor water supply systems. Related Citation: Gold, D., Trindade, B., Reed, P. M., and Characklis, G., "Conflicts in Coalitions: A Stability Analysis of Robust Multi-City Regional Water Supply Portfolios." (In-Preparation). New Water Eastern Transfer Institutions to Aid Regional Supply Flexibility: As the environmental and financial costs of developing dams and reservoirs continue to grow, water utilities across the United States have increasingly considered reallocating their water supply, particularly during drought, to maintain water supply reliability and reduce long-term costs. Reallocation schemes, like transfers of untreated, "raw" water from irrigation to urban activities in the western U.S., have seen success. Small transfers of treated water occur in the eastern U.S., but a lack of appropriate institutions has resulted in few raw water transfers; introduction of western reallocation schemes may help urban centers of the eastern U.S. meet future demands. One such region is the Research Triangle of North Carolina (Triangle), at risk of future water scarcity due to rapid population growth and climate change. Raleigh, the largest Triangle community, can access transfers only as small volumes of treated water piped through infrastructure connections from outside its watershed. An alternative to this expensive and politically unpopular option is transfer via raw water releases from Durham, another Triangle community, downstream to Raleigh. Raw water releases can alleviate short-term supply deficits without the need for costly infrastructure or inter-basin transfers. To assess the regional influence of raw releases, this work develops and evaluates three types of raw release agreement between Durham and Raleigh: spot releases of water, option contracts for releases, and capacity expansion through joint infrastructure development. Related Citation: Gorelick, D., Zeff, H., Characklis, G., and Reed, P. M., "Integrating raw water transfers into an Eastern United States management context.", ASCE Journal Water Resources Planning & Management, DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000966, (In-Press). Reducing Robustness Conflicts in the Research Triangle: Emerging water scarcity concerns in southeastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, limited coordination across adjacent municipalities and the increasing risks for sustained regional droughts. Managing these uncertainties will require that regional water utilities identify regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that trigger the appropriate actions needed to avoid water shortages and financial instabilities. In Funding Year 2 we have used the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, to engage the water utilities within Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill in cooperative and robust regional water portfolio planning. Prior analysis of this region through the year 2025 has identified significant regional vulnerabilities to volumetric shortfalls and financial losses. Moreover, efforts to maximize the individual robustness of any of the mentioned utilities also have the potential to strongly degrade the robustness of the others. This research advances a multi-stakeholder Many-Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) framework to better account for deeply uncertain factors when identifying cooperative management strategies. Results show that the sampling of deeply uncertain factors in the computational search phase of MORDM can aid in the discovery of management actions that substantially improve the robustness of individual utilities as well as the overall region to water scarcity. Cooperative water transfers, financial risk mitigation tools, and coordinated regional demand management must be explored jointly to decrease robustness conflicts between the utilities. The insights from this work have general merit for regions where adjacent municipalities can benefit from cooperative regional water portfolio planning. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Herman, J.D., Zeff, H.B., and Characklis, G., "Reducing regional drought vulnerabilities and multi-city robustness conflicts using many-objective optimization under deep uncertainty", Advances in Water Resources, v104, DOI: 10.1016/j.advwatres.2017.03.023,195-209, 2017.

    Publications

    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Gorelick, D., Zeff, H., Characklis, G., and Reed, P. M., Integrating raw water transfers into an Eastern United States management context., ASCE Journal Water Resources Planning & Management, DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000966, (In-Press).
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2017 Citation: Gold, D., B. Trindade, P. Reed, and G. Characklis (2017), Conflicts in Coalitions: A Stability Analysis of Robust Multi-City Regional Water Supply Portfolios, paper presented at AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2017 Citation: Trindade, B., and P. Reed (2017), Generalizable open source urban water portfolio simulation framework demonstrated using a multi-objective risk-based planning benchmark problem, paper presented at AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.


    Progress 08/15/16 to 08/14/17

    Outputs
    Target Audience:Project Year 3 encompasses August 2016-August 2017 where I have integrated the methods and results from this research into two graduate courses, continue supervise 2 PhDs, two overall project workshops with my collaborators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Fall 2017 workshop session with the Research Triangle water utilities. Additionally, the results from our Research Triangle efforts continue to garner broad interest by water utilities both nationally and globally. Moreover, emerging efforts are quickly translating the tools and results of this project into professional practice. Consequently, as part of this most recent reporting year Dr. Reed also participated in international workshops at the World Bank, in Switzerland, and Germany. Each of these activities is discussed in more detail below. CEE 5980 Decision Analysis Graduate course exploring decision making for complex engineering and environmental contexts. In the Fall 2016 the course was presented to 69 students representing a mixture of senior undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students from a broad range of departments. The course's students draw from a geographically and demographically diverse student body. As part of this most recent course, the Many-Objective Robust Decision Making tools used in this research project were introduced to the students as foundational resources for their original course projects. The tools allowed for a collaborative decision making experiment where students were allowed to formulate management strategies and then evaluate how well they performance given severe test case uncertainties. CEE 6200 Water Resources Systems Engineering Dr. Reed offered a course that deals with the growing concerns about how "change" (climate, land-use, population, etc.) will strain our water resources is motivating the need for the next generation of professionals that can innovate the planning and management of these systems. Course topics build on the legacy of research in the water resources systems area and seek to provide a new generation of planners with an enhanced ability to discover and negotiate the highly uncertain tradeoffs we face in balancing the water resources demands of the future. Students will be encouraged to explore what sustainable water management means given conflicting demands from renewable energy systems, ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The specific insights and urban water supply portfolio planning tools developed in support of this Water Sustainability & Climate project were integrated into the curriculum through computer exercises and a comprehensive project. Aiding the dissemination and value of these tools the course students interacted with David Gold in completing tasks that will help support our next Research Triangle planning efforts. The overall effort was a significant success for the 12 students enrolled (3 PhD, 4 Masters, 5 Seniors). August 1, 2016 WSC Results Featured in Lon Alamos National Lab's Frontiers in Geosciences Seminar series. Dr. Reed interacted with several groups and shared our recent risk-based infrastructure pathways and robustness assessment frameworks. The Frontiers in Geoscience Colloquia is organized by the Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) Division of LANL. EES is the intellectual home of Earth Sciences at Los Alamos, and has over 200 staff working on a complex set of earth science problems. The goal of the Frontiers in Geoscience seminar series is to bring to Los Alamos innovative scientists conducting research in fields of study that are complementary and potentially promote collaborations. August 22-25, 2016 Workshop Monte Verita, Switzerland on Smart Systems for Water Management Symposium and Summer School. Drs. Reed and Characklis interacted with students and international colleagues from a broad range of countries. Our WSC robustness and financial risk tools were featured components of the program. This Symposiumand Summer School aimed at exploring the perspective of urban water demand management for the next years. Several topics were addressed, with a particular attention on modelling and understanding the behavior of water consumers, the drivers of suchbehavior, the role of social norms, economic leverages and water demand management strategies to promote behavioral change, and the role ofInformation and Communication Technologies to support the design, implementation and deliver smart solutions for urban water demand management. November 10, 2016 Framework for Evaluating Alternative Water Supplies: Balancing Cost with Reliability, Resilience, and Sustainability, Water Research Foundation (WRF) Workshop. The water supply planning innovations from this WSC project have resulted in Dr. Reed's invitation to serve as Program Advisory Committee member for WRF project seeking to translate many of the robustness and planning innovations in practice. The workshop had 30 attendees including more than 20 major water utilities, academics, and representatives of major water planning agencies across the U.S. The MORDM framework advanced in this WSC project is strongly shaping what will be a translational report for providing guidance to practitioners. October 8, 2016 Research Triangle Workshop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The WSC team used this workshop day to explore emerging integrations across the risk, demand management, hydrology, and land-use/land cover change and climate projection tasks. The core goal of the meeting was to define our final two years of computational experiments that subject infrastructure development pathways to a broad mix of acute and persistent stressors (e.g., droughts, financial shocks, alternative development scenarios, etc.). November 16-17, 2016 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Global Workshop hosted by the World Bank, Washington, D.C. Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker and workshop tutorials leader to demonstrate the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for a broad international audience of more than 50 government, industrial, and academic attendees. The workshop included a broad range of disciplines and a range of professionals (e.g., graduate students to representatives of government ministries). As part of this workshop, Dr. Reed reviewed the state-of-the-art of the field using the Research Triangle test case and facilitated hands on software demonstrations and training examples. This included a live interactive exercise in planning challenges with the whole audience using web-based software tools. May 30-June 1, 2017 International Workshop on Coupled Human Natural Systems Hosted By Tübingen University, Germany. Dr. Characklis organized this international to strongly feature key innovations from this WSC project for a broad international academic audience. This workshop included 25 invited participants from several countries around the world including Germany, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Canada and Chile. July 18-21, 2017 Workshop on Integrated Energy-Water-Land Systems Dynamics Hosted by Stanford University. Drs. Reed and Characklis have been invited to this year's Snowmass to share their WSC insights on risk-based adaptation pathways, financial risk mitigation, and robust design. Since the summer of 1995 the Stanford-based Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) has organized a 2-week annual workshop, Climate Change Impact and Integrated Assessment (CCI/IA) that brings together climate change experts to discuss the state of the art in climate policy analysis. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Bernardo Trindade, PhD Candidate, Leading Computational Synthesis Tasks & Training. In Year 3 at Cornell, Bernardo continues to lead efforts in establishing the project wide computational synthesis framework for assessing tradeoffs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. As part of this effort, the Cornell and UNC-Chapel Hill teams have created direct student-to-student collaborations. Bernardo is working collaboratively with Dr. Harrison Zeff from UNC and helping train two new students (David Gold--Cornell; David Gorelick--UNC). David Gold, PhD Candidate, Computational Synthesis Framework Training. David joined the Cornell team in 2016 and is supporting the development and application of the overall computational synthesis framework. David is focusing on the stability of cooperative agreements to changing demands and drought extremes based on the relative benefits and regrets that different member utilities experience in the Research Triangle region. David Gorelick, MS Candidate, Financial Risk and Water Supply Instruments. David joined the UNC team in Fall 2015 and is being collaboratively trained by the Cornell team this year. He is looking at new collaborative water transfer schemes between Raleigh and Durham who represent the most challenged of the Research Triangle utilities. The goal is to diffuse competition for sources of water while aiding each city to become more robust. As discussed in the Target Audience section of this report, the computational synthesis framework has been featured in two major training workshops and in CEE 6200. August 22-25, 2016 Workshop Monte Verita, Switzerland on Smart Systems for Water Management Symposium and Summer School. Drs. Reed and Characklis interacted with students and international colleagues from a broad range of countries. Our WSC robustness and financial risk tools were featured components of the program. November 10, 2016 Framework for Evaluating Alternative Water Supplies: Balancing Cost with Reliability, Resilience, and Sustainability, Water Research Foundation (WRF) Workshop. The water supply planning innovations from this WSC project have resulted in Dr. Reed's invitation to serve as Program Advisory Committee member for WRF project seeking to translate many of the robustness and planning innovations in practice. November 16-17, 2016 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Global Workshop hosted by the World Bank, Washington, D.C. Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker and workshop tutorials leader to demonstrate the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for a broad international audience of more than 50 government, industrial, and academic attendees. May 30-June 1, 2017 International Workshop on Coupled Human Natural Systems Hosted By Tübingen University, Germany. Dr. Characklis organized this international to strongly feature key innovations from this WSC project for a broad international academic audience. This workshop included 25 invited participants from several countries around the world including Germany, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Canada and Chile. July 18-21, 2017 Workshop on Integrated Energy-Water-Land Systems Dynamics Hosted by Stanford University. Drs. Reed and Characklis have been invited to this year's Snowmass to share their WSC insights on risk-based adaptation pathways, financial risk mitigation, and robust design. CEE 6200 Water Resources Systems Engineering. The course had 12 students enrolled (3 PhD, 4 Masters, 5 Seniors). Dr. Reed used the computational synthesis framework to help students to explore what sustainable water management means given conflicting demands from renewable energy systems, ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The specific insights and urban water supply portfolio planning tools developed in support of this Water Sustainability & Climate project were integrated into the curriculum through computer exercises and a comprehensive project. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Dr. Reed participated in the following suite of workshops, panels, or seminars that have broad audiences that include other technical disciplines and in many instances the general public. Frontiers in Geosciences Speaker, Los Alamos National Lab, NM, August 1, 2016. Smart Systems for Water Management Symposium, Plenary Speaker, Monte Verita, Switzerland, August 24, 2016. Symposium of Search-Based Software Engineering, Plenary Speaker, Raleigh, NC, October 8, 2016. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU 2016), Plenary Speaker & Invited Interactive Tutorial Session Organizer, World Bank, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2016. European Geophysical Union Spring 2017 Assembly, Invited Speaker, Session HS8.1.3 Model Uncertainties, Parameter Estimation, and Data Assimilation in Surface and Subsurface Hydrology, Vienna, Austria, April 25, 2017. BEACON Center Seminar Series, Michigan State University, April 13, 2017. International Workshop on Coupled Human Natural Systems, Invited Speaker, Tübingen University, Germany, May 30, 2017. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?(1) Use the Upper Neuse River Basin (1994km2) and a major portion of the Upper Cape Fear Basin, the Jordan Lake watershed (4367 km2), which are adjacent watersheds in central North Carolina as a regional test bed. Work to better account for how climate change and land-use/land cover (LULC) trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability. Year 4 Plan: The UNC-Chapel Hill, US Forest Service and Cornell teams are actively working to develop an integrated workflow that will allow LU/LC, vegetation dynamics, and climate change scenarios to be integrated into the infrastructure modeling. The Cornell team's role will be to help the UNC-Chapel Hill collaborators in evaluating the sensitivities and key uncertainties in the projections. This work is non-trivial and will likely take more than a single project year. As a failsafe, the Cornell team is also establishing linkages with the climate change modeling group at the US Army Corp of Engineers and will investigate their existing projections for the Triangle Region. (2) Assess the long-term regional water supply options for The Research Triangle which straddles the Upper Neuse and Upper Cape Fear basins with a growing population of nearly 2 million and four primary population centers in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill. Year 4 Plan: A core task for the next project year builds off of the baseline for time adaptive and state-dependent infrastructure options in the Research Triangle developed in Year 3. This work will explore the robustness of integrated risk-based pathways combining infrastructure, conservation, water transfers, and financial risk instruments. As of Summer 2017, a significant amount of the underlying computational synthesis tools needed for this analysis have been developed. This will be the first study to explore the robustness of multiple cities that are using dynamic risk-of-failure (ROF) planning triggers. A challenge and unique contribution of this work is that the ROF-based pathways more effectively use scenario information (e.g., supply capacity and demand dynamics) to develop highly adaptive, probabilistic infrastructure pathways. (3) Assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets. Year 4 Plan: As discussed above, our team will work to demonstrate the value of cooperation via water transfers, coordinated demand management, and shared investments in infrastructure. A challenge that emerges with cooperation is that each of the 4 cities have their own unique pressures and risk profiles. Consequently, our team has discovered that the individual risk aversion of member cities and their efforts to maximize their individual robustness can have significantly negative effects on other regional stakeholders. The Cornell team is going to lead a more detailed investigation of our ability to understand and ameliorate the robustness tradeoffs between the member cities of Triangle Region. We will work through interactive sessions with the utilities to characterize their desired performance requirements and the resulting individual as regional robustness effects.

    Impacts
    What was accomplished under these goals? Time Adaptive Robustness for Co-Evolving Infrastructure Systems: Emerging water scarcity concerns in southeastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors. It has been shown that regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that do not rely on building new infrastructure can be used by water utilities to mitigate the effects of water scarcity and financial instability, the latter caused by conservation and transfers, in the near future. However, in the longer term, infrastructure expansion is likely to be necessary to address rising water demand/availability ratios which may result from changes in deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, and the increasing risks for sustained regional droughts. Current practice is to rely on deterministic projections for such factors which, should they prove inaccurate, may lead to stranded assets or system failure. One solution is to devise infrastructure expansion plans based on risk-based action triggers that are robust, meaning that they are insensitive to variations in assumptions about deeply uncertain factors. However, the development of a system robustness metric simultaneously encompassing short and long-term planning becomes increasingly difficult as the infrastructure itself evolves. This research broadens the assessment of robustness to better resolve time evolving infrastructure adaptation pathways for the North Carolina Research Triangle. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Herman, J.D., Zeff, H.B., and Characklis, G., " Time evolving multi-city dependencies and robustness tradeoffs for risk-based portfolios of conservation, transfers, and cooperative water supply infrastructure development." (In-Preparation). New Water Eastern Transfer Institutions to Aid Regional Supply Flexibility: . Reallocation schemes, like transfers of untreated, "raw" water from irrigation to urban activities in the western U.S., have seen success. Small transfers of treated water occur in the eastern U.S., but a lack of appropriate institutions has resulted in few raw water transfers; introduction of western reallocation schemes may help urban centers of the eastern U.S. meet future demands. One such region is the Research Triangle of North Carolina (Triangle), at risk of future water scarcity due to rapid population growth and climate change. Raleigh, the largest Triangle community, can access transfers only as small volumes of treated water piped through infrastructure connections from outside its watershed. An alternative to this expensive and politically unpopular option is transfer via raw water releases from Durham, another Triangle community, downstream to Raleigh. Raw water releases can alleviate short-term supply deficits without the need for costly infrastructure or inter-basin transfers. T Related Citation: Gorelick, D., Zeff, H.B., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G.W., "Integrating raw water transfers into eastern US management context: a multi-objective analysis." (In-Preparation). Bottom Up Drought Vulnerability Analysis for the Research Triangle Test Bed: Our team is continuing to expand a comprehensive water supply infrastructure model that encompasses 9 reservoirs, the Upper Neuse, the Upper Cape Fear, and Jordan Lake watersheds. In Funding Year 2, our team has published a new framework for bottom up drought vulnerability analysis. Robustness analyses of water supply systems have moved toward exploratory simulation to discover scenarios in which existing or planned policies may fail to meet stakeholder objectives. Such assessments rely heavily on the choice of plausible future scenarios, which, in the case of drought management, requires sampling or generating a broad ensemble of reservoir inflows which do not necessarily reflect the historical record. Here we adapt a widely used synthetic streamflow generation method to adjust the frequency of low-flow periods, which can be related to impactful historical events from the perspective of decision makers. Related Citation: Herman, J., Zeff, H., Lamontagne, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Synthetic Drought Scenario Generation to Support Bottom-Up Water Supply Vulnerability Assessments.", Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, v142, no. 11, 2016. Reducing Robustness Conflicts in the Research Triangle: Emerging water scarcity concerns in southeastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, limited coordination across adjacent municipalities and the increasing risks for sustained regional droughts. Managing these uncertainties will require that regional water utilities identify regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that trigger the appropriate actions needed to avoid water shortages and financial instabilities. In Funding Year 2 we have used the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, to engage the water utilities within Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill in cooperative and robust regional water portfolio planning. Prior analysis of this region through the year 2025 has identified significant regional vulnerabilities to volumetric shortfalls and financial losses. Moreover, efforts to maximize the individual robustness of any of the mentioned utilities also have the potential to strongly degrade the robustness of the others. This research advances a multi-stakeholder Many-Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) framework to better account for deeply uncertain factors when identifying cooperative management strategies. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Herman, J.D., Zeff, H.B., and Characklis, G., "Reducing regional drought vulnerabilities and multi-city robustness conflicts using many-objective optimization under deep uncertainty.", Advances in Water Resources, v104, DOI: 10.1016/j.advwatres.2017.03.023,195-209, 2017. Regional Water Supply Options Through 2060: In Funding Year 2, our project has reached a major milestone in studying the long term planning pathways for the Research Triangle region. We have also successfully collaborated with the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary to develop a comprehensive master list of all major and minor infrastructure investments that are being considered in the region. Our team facilitating their consideration of mixtures of cooperative treated water transfers, coordinated regional conservation, reservoir expansions, reclaimed water, expanded water treatment, and cooperative investments. The Chapel Hill and Cornell teams have integrated these future options into the Research Triangle model and are finalizing results for the first suite of papers to consider planning through 2060. Our team and Dr. Greg Characklis have published a technical review paper and are working two additional journal papers that are demonstrating how Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary face unique individual vulnerabilities as well as collective regional vulnerabilities. Our team is actively working with the cities to demonstrate pathways where regional cooperation can improve their individual risk profiles as well as the overall regional risk profile. This work is addressing water supply portfolio planning by advancing an innovative multiobjective framework where the utilities can explore "time-adaptive" options that can flexibly shift to address unexpected risks (e.g., shifts in demands or sustained droughts). We summarize the major water supply instruments and time-adaptive risk trigger planning strategies formulated over this project year below. Related Citation: Zeff, H.B., Herman, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Cooperative drought adaptation: Integrating infrastructure development, conservation, and water transfers into adaptive policy pathways.", Water Resources Research, v52, no. 9, 10.1002/2016WR018771: 7327-7346, 2016.

    Publications

    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2016 Citation: B. C. Trindade, P. M. Reed, H. B. Zeff, and G. W. Characklis. Time evolving multi-city dependencies and robustness tradeoffs for risk-based portfolios of conservation, transfers, and cooperative water supply infrastructure development. AGU Fall Meeting, December 2016.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2016 Citation: J.D. Quinn, P. M. Reed, M. Giuliani, A. Castelletti, and R. Soncini-Sessa. Bridging the False Divide: Are We Ignoring the Role of Adaptive Operations for Improving the Efficiency, Resilience and Robustness of Planned Infrastructure? Case #2: Large Storage Operations under Change: Expanding Uncertainties and Evolving Tradeoffs. DMDU Workshop, November 2016.
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Herman, J.D., Zeff, H.B., and Characklis, G., "Reducing regional drought vulnerabilities and multi-city robustness conflicts using many-objective optimization under deep uncertainty.", Advances in Water Resources, v104, DOI: 10.1016/j.advwatres.2017.03.023, 195-209, 2017.
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Zeff, H.B., Herman, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Cooperative drought adaptation: Integrating infrastructure development, conservation, and water transfers into adaptive policy pathways.", Water Resources Research, v52, no. 9, 10.1002/2016WR018771: 7327-7346, 2016.
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Herman, J., Zeff, H., Lamontagne, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Synthetic Drought Scenario Generation to Support Bottom-Up Water Supply Vulnerability Assessments.", Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, v142, no. 11, 2016.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2017 Citation: D. Gorelick, H. B. Zeff, P. M. Reed, and G. W. Characklis. Integrating raw water transfers into eastern US management context: a multi-objective analysis. EWRI Congress, Sacramento, CA, May 2017.


    Progress 08/15/15 to 08/14/16

    Outputs
    Target Audience:Project Year 2 encompasses August 2015-August 2016 where I have integrated the methods and results from this research into two graduate courses, PhD supervision, and two overall project workshops with my collaborators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as the Research Triangle water utilities. Additionally, the initial results from our Research Triangle efforts have garnered significant interest globally. Consequently, as part of this most recent reporting year Dr. Reed also participated in international workshops in the Netherlands as well as the United Kingdom. Each of these activities is discussed in more detail below. CEE 5980 Decision Analysis Graduate course exploring decision making for complex engineering and environmental contexts. In the Fall 2015 the course was presented to 30 students representing a mixture of senior undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students from a broad range of departments. The course's students draw from a geographically and demographically diverse student body. As part of this most recent course, the Many-Objective Robust Decision Making tools used in this research project were introduced to the students as foundational resources for their original course projects. The tools allowed for a collaborative decision making experiment where students were allowed to formulate management strategies and then evaluate how well they performance given severe test case uncertainties. CEE 6200 Water Resources Systems Engineering Dr. Reed offered a course that deals with the growing concerns about how "change" (climate, land-use, population, etc.) will strain our water resources is motivating the need for the next generation of professionals that can innovate the planning and management of these systems. Course topics build on the legacy of research in the water resources systems area and seek to provide a new generation of planners with an enhanced ability to discover and negotiate the highly uncertain tradeoffs we face in balancing the water resources demands of the future. Students will be encouraged to explore what sustainable water management means given conflicting demands from renewable energy systems, ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The specific insights and urban water supply portfolio planning tools developed in support of this Water Sustainability & Climate project were integrated into the curriculum through computer exercises and a comprehensive project. Aiding the dissemination and value of these tools the course students interacted with the Colorado Springs Water Utility to provide them with new abilities to explore the tradeoffs and uncertainties in their 2016 Integrated Water Resource Planning (IWRP) effort. The project required the students to elicit key concerns from actual IWRP staff leaders and then develop web-based decision support tools. The overall effort was a significant success for the students and it has translated into operational use of new many-objective visual analytics in the Colorado Springs IWRP. The course had 12 students enrolled (3 PhD, 4 Masters, 5 Seniors). August 27-28, 2015 Workshop at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill & Utilities' Briefing Dr. Reed interacted with collaborators in a day long workshop that was attended by all collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the US Forest Service. In attendance were 4 PhD students involved in this project including one female economics major. The workshop discussed project extensions to facilitate a transition from the 2015-2025 water supply planning period that does not consider new infrastructure to a regional plan through 2060 that includes infrastructure pathways for all of the participant utilities. The second day of the effort consisted of meetings attended by the operational staffs of the Orange Water & Sewer Authority (OWASA--Chapel Hill, Carrboro), Raleigh, Durham, and Cary. The meeting also included a representative of the Triangle Region J Council of Governments. This utilities briefing illustrated the importance of conservation and coordinated water transfers to avoid major infrastructure investments through 2025. November 3-5, 2015 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Global Workshop in Delft, Netherlands Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker and workshop tutorials leader to demonstrate the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for a broad international audience of more than 50 government, industrial, and academic attendees. The workshop included a broad range of disciplines and a range of professionals (e.g., graduate students to representatives of government ministries). As part of this workshop, Dr. Reed reviewed the state-of-the-art of the field using the Research Triangle test case and facilitated hands on software demonstrations and training examples. February 6-13, 2016 United Kingdom (UK) Imperial University Decision Making under Uncertainty Workshop Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker sharing the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for an audience of 50 composed of mostly of UK government and industrial attendees. The workshop strongly focused on robust and resilient planning on interdependent infrastructures (e.g., water and energy systems). As part of this workshop, Dr. Reed reviewed the state-of-the-art of the field using the Research Triangle test case and facilitated detailed discussions on how the work translates to other UK contexts. May 5-6, 2016 Workshop at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill & Utilities' Briefing Dr. Reed interacted with collaborators in a day long workshop that was attended by all collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the US Forest Service. In attendance were 4 PhD students involved in this project including one female economics major. The workshop discussed project extensions for 2060 planning efforts to create consistent land-use/land-cover, hydroclimatology, and socio-economic scenarios. These scenarios will inform future efforts to recommend water supply infrastructure pathways for the Research Triangle. The second day of the effort consisted of meetings attended by the operational staffs of the Orange Water & Sewer Authority (OWASA--Chapel Hill, Carrboro), Raleigh, Durham, and Cary. This utilities briefing demonstrated and elicited feedback on our preliminary concepts for using risk-of-failure to trigger combinations of infrastructure investments, demand management, and regional transfers in integrated infrastructure pathways. Overall the workshop and briefings over these two days were foundational to our team's decision support for the region's long term 2060 planning. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Bernardo Trindade, PhD Candidate, Leading Computational Synthesis Tasks & Training. In Year 2, Cornell Bernardo took over from Jon Herman to continue leading efforts in establishing the project wide computational synthesis framework for assessing tradeoffs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. As part of this effort, the Cornell and UNC-Chapel Hill teams have created direct student-to-student collaborations. Bernardo is working collaboratively with Dr. Harrison Zeff from UNC and helping train two new students (David Gold--Cornell; David Gorelick--UNC). David Gold, PhD Candidate, Computational Synthesis Framework Training. David joined the Cornell team in the Spring of 2016 and will be transitioning to also support the development and application of the overall computational synthesis framework. David will focus on the theoretical challenges in bridging climate change projections and land-use/land-cover projections into the Many-Objective Robust Decision Making tools. David Gorelick, MS Candidate, Financial Risk and Water Supply Instruments. David joined the UNC team in Fall 2015 and is being collaboratively trained by the Cornell team in the summer of 2016. He is looking at new collaborative water transfer schemes between Raleigh and Durham who represent the most challenged of the Research Triangle utilities. The goal is to diffuse competition for sources of water while aiding each city to become more robust. As discussed in the Target Audience section of this report, the computational synthesis framework has been featured in two major training workshops and in CEE 6200. November 3-5, 2015 Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Global Workshop in Delft, Netherlands. The workshop included a broad range of disciplines and a range of professionals (e.g., graduate students to representatives of government ministries). As part of this workshop, Dr. Reed reviewed the state-of-the-art of the field using the Research Triangle test case and facilitated hands on software demonstrations and training examples. February 6-13, 2016 United Kingdom (UK) Imperial University Decision Making under Uncertainty Workshop. Dr. Reed served as a plenary speaker sharing the most recent "Many-objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM)" applications and underlying software for an audience of 50 composed of mostly of UK government and industrial attendees. The workshop strongly focused on robust and resilient planning on interdependent infrastructures (e.g., water and energy systems). As part of this workshop, Dr. Reed reviewed the state-of-the-art of the field using the Research Triangle test case and facilitated detailed discussions on how the work translates to other UK contexts. CEE 6200 Water Resources Systems Engineering. The course had 12 students enrolled (3 PhD, 4 Masters, 5 Seniors). Dr. Reed used the computational synthesis framework to help students to explore what sustainable water management means given conflicting demands from renewable energy systems, ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The specific insights and urban water supply portfolio planning tools developed in support of this Water Sustainability & Climate project were integrated into the curriculum through computer exercises and a comprehensive project. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Dr. Reed participated in the following suite of workshops, panels, or seminars that have broad audiences that include other technical disciplines and in many instances the general public. Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, iSEE Congress 2015: Water Planet, Water Crises? Meeting the World's Water-Food-Energy Needs Sustainably, Plenary Speaker, Urbana-Champaign, IL., September 15, 2015. Global Institute for Water Security Seminar Speaker, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, October 2, 2015. RAND Corporation Seminar Speaker, Santa Monica, CA, October 16, 2015. 3rd Annual Meeting on Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty, Delft Technical University, Plenary Speaker, Delft, Netherlands, November 3, 2015. Denver Water Integrated Resources Planning Seminar, Invited Speaker, Denver, CO, November 23, 2015. Oxford University, Water Network Evening Seminar Series, Invited Speaker, Oxford, UK, February 8, 2016. Imperial University, Decision Making Under Uncertainty Workshop, Plenary Speaker, February 10-11, 2016. Bristol University, Water Resources Engineering Seminar Series, Invited Speaker, Bristol, UK, February 12, 2016. Tampa Bay Water Authority, Invited Speaker, Tampa, FL, March 23, 2016. Colorado Water Conservation Board, Invited Speaker, Denver, CO, May 13, 2016. Argonne National Laboratory, Environmental Science Division, Invited Speaker, Chicago, IL., July 11, 2016. Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) 2016 Science Biennial, Session Organizer and Discussant, "Integrated Observation, Prediction, and Management of Water Resources in a Changing World: Big Data Opportunity or Paradox", National Conservation Training Center, Shepherdstown, WV, July 25, 2016. Los Alamos National Laboratory, FY16 Frontiers in Geoscience Colloquium Series, Invited Speaker, Los Alamos, NM, August 1, 2016. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?(1) Use the Upper Neuse River Basin (1994km2) and a major portion of the Upper Cape Fear Basin, the Jordan Lake watershed (4367 km2), which are adjacent watersheds in central North Carolina as a regional test bed. Work to better account for how climate change and land-use/land cover (LULC) trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability. Year 3 Plan: The UNC-Chapel Hill, US Forest Service and Cornell teams are actively working to develop an integrated workflow that will allow LU/LC, vegetation dynamics, and climate change scenarios to be integrated into the infrastructure modeling. The Cornell team's role will be to help the UNC-Chapel Hill collaborators in evaluating the sensitivities and key uncertainties in the projections. This work is non-trivial and will likely take more than a single project year. As a failsafe, the Cornell team is also establishing linkages with the climate change modeling group at the US Army Corp of Engineers and will investigate their existing projections for the Triangle Region. (2) Assess the long-term regional water supply options for The Research Triangle which straddles the Upper Neuse and Upper Cape Fear basins with a growing population of nearly 2 million and four primary population centers in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill. Year 3 Plan: A core task for the next project year builds off of the baseline for time adaptive and state-dependent infrastructure options in the Research Triangle developed in Year 2. This work will explore the robustness of integrated risk-based pathways combining infrastructure, conservation, water transfers, and financial risk instruments. As of Summer 2016, a significant amount of the underlying computational synthesis tools needed for this analysis have been developed. This will be the first study to explore the robustness of multiple cities that are using dynamic risk-of-failure (ROF) planning triggers. A challenge and unique contribution of this work is that the ROF-based pathways more effectively use scenario information (e.g., supply capacity and demand dynamics) to develop highly adaptive, probabilistic infrastructure pathways. (3) Assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets. Year 3 Plan: As discussed above, our team will work to demonstrate the value of cooperation via water transfers, coordinated demand management, and shared investments in infrastructure. A challenge that emerges with cooperation is that each of the 4 cities have their own unique pressures and risk profiles. Consequently, our team has discovered that the individual risk aversion of member cities and their efforts to maximize their individual robustness can have significantly negative effects on other regional stakeholders. The Cornell team is going to lead a more detailed investigation of our ability to understand and ameliorate the robustness tradeoffs between the member cities of Triangle Region. We will work through interactive sessions with the utilities to characterize their desired performance requirements and the resulting individual as regional robustness effects.

    Impacts
    What was accomplished under these goals? Bottom Up Drought Vulnerability Analysis for the Research Triangle Test Bed: Our team is continuing to expand a comprehensive water supply infrastructure model that encompasses 9 reservoirs, the Upper Neuse, the Upper Cape Fear, and Jordan Lake watersheds. In Funding Year 2, our team has published a new framework for bottom up drought vulnerability analysis. Robustness analyses of water supply systems have moved toward exploratory simulation to discover scenarios in which existing or planned policies may fail to meet stakeholder objectives. Such assessments rely heavily on the choice of plausible future scenarios, which, in the case of drought management, requires sampling or generating a broad ensemble of reservoir inflows which do not necessarily reflect the historical record. Here we adapt a widely used synthetic streamflow generation method to adjust the frequency of low-flow periods, which can be related to impactful historical events from the perspective of decision makers. Specifically, the modified generation procedure allows the user to specify parameters n, p such that events with observed weekly non-exceedance frequency p appear in the synthetic scenario with approximate frequency np (i.e., the pth percentile flow occurs n times more frequently). Additionally, the generator preserves the historical autocorrelation of streamflow and its seasonality, as well as approximate multi-site correlation. Using model simulations from recent work in multi-objective urban drought portfolio planning in North Carolina, a region whose water supply faces both climate and population pressures, we illustrate the decision-relevant consequences caused by raising the frequency of low flows associated with the 2007-2008 drought. This method explores system performance under extreme events of increasing frequency prior to reconciling these findings with climate model projections, and thus can be used to support bottom-up robustness methods in water systems planning. Related Citation: Herman, J., Zeff, H., Lamontagne, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Synthetic Drought Scenario Generation to Support Bottom-Up Water Supply Vulnerability Assessments.", Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, (In-Press). Reducing Robustness Conflicts in the Research Triangle: Emerging water scarcity concerns in southeastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, limited coordination across adjacent municipalities and the increasing risks for sustained regional droughts. Managing these uncertainties will require that regional water utilities identify regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that trigger the appropriate actions needed to avoid water shortages and financial instabilities. In Funding Year 2 we have used the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, to engage the water utilities within Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill in cooperative and robust regional water portfolio planning. Prior analysis of this region through the year 2025 has identified significant regional vulnerabilities to volumetric shortfalls and financial losses. Moreover, efforts to maximize the individual robustness of any of the mentioned utilities also have the potential to strongly degrade the robustness of the others. This research advances a multi-stakeholder Many-Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) framework to better account for deeply uncertain factors when identifying cooperative management strategies. Results show that the sampling of deeply uncertain factors in the computational search phase of MORDM can aid in the discovery of management actions that substantially improve the robustness of individual utilities as well as the overall region to water scarcity. Cooperative water transfers, financial risk mitigation tools, and coordinated regional demand management must be explored jointly to decrease robustness conflicts between the utilities. The insights from this work have general merit for regions where adjacent municipalities can benefit from cooperative regional water portfolio planning. Related Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Zeff, H., Herman, J., and Characklis, G., "Reducing Regional Water Supply Vulnerabilities and Multi-City Robustness Conflicts when Confronting a Deeply Uncertain Future.", Advances in Water Resources, (In-Preparation for August 2016 Submission). Regional Water Supply Options Through 2060: In Funding Year 2, our project has reached a major milestone in studying the long term planning pathways for the Research Triangle region. We have also successfully collaborated with the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary to develop a comprehensive master list of all major and minor infrastructure investments that are being considered in the region. Our team facilitating their consideration of mixtures of cooperative treated water transfers, coordinated regional conservation, reservoir expansions, reclaimed water, expanded water treatment, and cooperative investments. The Chapel Hill and Cornell teams have integrated these future options into the Research Triangle model and are finalizing results for the first suite of papers to consider planning through 2060. Our team and Dr. Greg Characklis have published a technical review paper and are working two additional journal papers that are demonstrating how Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary face unique individual vulnerabilities as well as collective regional vulnerabilities. Our team is actively working with the cities to demonstrate pathways where regional cooperation can improve their individual risk profiles as well as the overall regional risk profile. This work is addressing water supply portfolio planning by advancing an innovative multiobjective framework where the utilities can explore "time-adaptive" options that can flexibly shift to address unexpected risks (e.g., shifts in demands or sustained droughts). Related Citation: Zeff, H., Herman, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Cooperative Drought Adaptation: Integrating Infrastructure Development, Conservation, and Water Transfers into Adaptive Policy Pathways.", Water Resources Research, (In-Revision).

    Publications

    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2016 Citation: Zeff, H., Herman, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., Cooperative Drought Adaptation: Integrating Infrastructure Development, Conservation, and Water Transfers into Adaptive Policy Pathways., Water Resources Research, (In-Revision).
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Other Year Published: 2016 Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P.M., Zeff, H., Herman, J., and Characklis, G., Reducing Regional Water Supply Vulnerabilities and Multi-City Robustness Conflicts when Confronting a Deeply Uncertain Future., Advances in Water Resources, (In-Preparation for August 2016 Submission).
    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2016 Citation: Herman, J., Zeff, H., Lamontagne, J., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Synthetic Drought Scenario Generation to Support Bottom-Up Water Supply Vulnerability Assessments.", Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, (In-Press).
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Zeff, H.B., Herman, J.D., Reed, P.M., and Characklis, G., "Cooperative drought adaptation: Integrating infrastructure development, conservation, and water transfers into adaptive policy pathways.", Fall 2015 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, California, December 2015.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Herman, J.D., Reed, P.M., Zeff, H.B., and Characklis, G., "Synthetic drought scenario generation to support bottom-up water supply vulnerability assessments.", Fall 2015 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, California, December 2015.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Trindade, B., Reed, P. M., Herman, J.D., Zeff, H.B., and Characklis, G., "Reducing regional vulnerabilities and multi-city robustness conflicts using many-objective optimization under deep uncertainty", Fall 2015 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, California, December 2015.


    Progress 08/15/14 to 08/14/15

    Outputs
    Target Audience: Project Year 1 encompasses August 2014-August 2015 where I have integrated the methods and results from this research into two graduate courses, an undergraduate independent study, PhD supervision, and an overall project workshop with my collaborators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each of these activities are discussed in more detail below. CEE 5980 Decision Analysis Graduate course exploring decision making for complex engineering and environmental contexts. In the Fall 2014 the course was presented to 36 students representing a mixture of senior undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students from a broad range of departments. The course's students draw from a geographically and demographically diverse student body. The research project has contributed uncertainty analysis tools that were integrated into introductory programming exercises for two homeworks. CEE 3090 Undergraduate Independent Study Developing Software-based Teaching Test Cases for Multiobjective Management of Water Resources Sophomore Abigail Birnbaum, a female Sophomore Civil Engineering student participated in weekly meetings with Dr. Reed to learn the fundamentals of multiobjective systems analysis and water resources management. The weekly meetings were augmented with the testing and development of software-based teaching tutorials that can be used to illustrate the fundamentals. Assignments included basic programming exercises, learning data analysis software, gaining familiarity with using high-performance computing resources, the development of software documentation, and contributions to educational software modules. CEE 6660 Multiobjective Systems Engineering Under Uncertainty Dr. Reed developed a new graduate course offering at Cornell that disseminates the advanced decision support tools that are central to this proposed project. This course uses programming case studies and projects drawn from the disciplines of participating students to introduce emerging multiobjective design tools that enhance systems engineering design under uncertainty. Beyond the focus on multiobjective optimization, the course will also expose students to relevant research related to constructive decision-aiding theory, decision-biases identified in the behavioral economics literature related to risk, and recent advances in visual analytics that have been demonstrated to enhance design processes. A core goal of this course is to help students integrate human intelligence and computational power to effectively explore design hypotheses, discover critical system tradeoffs, and facilitate robust design decisions. The course had 7 PhD students enrolled, including two Latino Civil Engineering graduate students. October 1&2, 2014 Workshop at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr. Reed lead an effort to demonstrate his computational tools and the overall strategy for synthesizing the modeling efforts for this project. The day long workshop was attended by all collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the US Forest Service. In attendance were 4 PhD students involved in this project including one female economics major. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Jon Herman, PhD Candidate, Graduated May 2015, Starting Faculty Position University of California Davis in the Fall of 2015: Lead Year 1 Cornell efforts in establishing the project wide computational synthesis framework for assessing tradeoffs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. As part of this effort, the Cornell and UNC-Chapel Hill teams created a detailed taxonomy and review of all prior work related to robust planning under deep uncertainty. The framework has been featured in two major training workshops. RAND Corporation, Second Annual Workshop on Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty, November 18-19, 2014, Santa Monica, CA. The purpose of the workshop was to foster a community of practice around decision making under deep uncertainty, in order to improve methods and tools, facilitate their use in practice, and ultimately encourage sound decision making in our rapidly changing world. Worldbank, Resilient Solutions for Long Run Climate Change, May 11, 2015, Washington, DC. The World Bank through its Climate Policy team and the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) is brought together experts to share practical resilient solutions for addressing the risks of long-run climate change to development. The experts are advancing frameworks to identify major gaps and challenges for adaptation due to existing regulatory, land-use planning, financial and market incentives; and options they have devised to overcome these challenges. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Dr. Reed participated in the following suite of workshops, panels, or seminars that have broad audiences that include other technical disciplines and in many instances the general public. 1. RAND Corporation, Second Annual Workshop on Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty, November 18-19, 2014, Santa Monica, CA. 2. Current Challenges in Computing Conference (C-Cubed): Decision Sciences, Organized by RAND Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, December 1-3, 2014. 3. University of Wisconsin at Madison Weston Roundtable Seminar Series on Sustainability, March 26, 2015, Madison, WI. 4. Cornell University Sesquicentennial Celebration Weekend Panel, Is the Future Secure and Sustainable?, April 25, 2015, Ithaca, NY. 5. Worldbank, Resilient Solutions for Long Run Climate Change, May 11, 2015, Washington, DC. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? (1) Use the Upper Neuse River Basin (1994km2) and a major portion of the Upper Cape Fear Basin, the Jordan Lake watershed (4367 km2), which are adjacent watersheds in central North Carolina as a regional test bed. Work to better account for how climate change and land-use/land cover (LULC) trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability. Year 2 Plan: The UNC-Chapel Hill, US Forest Service and Cornell teams are actively working to develop an integrated workflow that will allow LU/LC, vegetation dynamics, and climate change scenarios to be integrated into the infrastructure modeling. The Cornell team's role will be to help the UNC-Chapel Hill collaborators in evaluating the sensitivities and key uncertainties in the projections. This work is non-trivial and will likely take more than a single project year. As a failsafe, the Cornell team is also establishing linkages with the climate change modeling group at the US Army Corp of Engineers and will investigate their existing projections for the Triangle Region. (2) Assess the long-term regional water supply options for The Research Triangle which straddles the Upper Neuse and Upper Cape Fear basins with a growing population of nearly 2 million and four primary population centers in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill. Year 2 Plan: A core task for the next project year is to establish a baseline for time adaptive and state-dependent infrastructure options in the Research Triangle. Three core formulations will be considered (i) the 4 cities planning conservation and infrastructure investments through 2060 in isolation as is the present case; (ii) the 4 cities developing cooperative water transfers, conservation strategies as well as infrastructure investments through 2060; and (iii) the 4 cities blending cooperative investments in infrastructure, transfers, and regional conservation through 2060. These formulation are first going to be explored assuming that the LU/LC and hydro-climatic contexts will not change drastically from the present. The purpose of this baseline is show that even without these pressures the benefits of regional cooperation via transfers, shared infrastructure investments and coordinated regional demand management. Many of the initial computational experiments have been or will be completed in the summer of 2015. (3) Assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets. Year 2 Plan: As discussed above, our team will work to demonstrate the value of cooperation via water transfers, coordinated demand management, and shared investments in infrastructure. A challenge that emerges with cooperation is that each of the 4 cities have their own unique pressures and risk profiles. Consequently, our team has discovered that the individual risk aversion of member cities and their efforts to maximize their individual robustness can have significantly negative effects on other regional stakeholders. The Cornell team is going to lead a more detailed investigation of our ability to understand and ameliorate the robustness tradeoffs between the member cities of Triangle Region. We will work through interactive sessions with the utilities to characterize their desired performance requirements and the resulting individual as regional robustness effects.

    Impacts
    What was accomplished under these goals? The Research Triangle Test Bed: Our team has successfully developed a comprehensive water supply infrastructure model that encompasses 9 reservoirs, the Upper Neuse, the Upper Cape Fear, and Jordan Lake watersheds. Our team is starting with a stochastic hydrology generator to develop baseline hydro-climatic scenarios for drought in the region. The scenarios account for spatial correlation and temporal autocorrelation in all gaged streamflows. This baseline will be used to contrast the effects of land-use/land-cover change and climate change on drought risks. We anticipate a potential journal submission on this topic in the next project year. Regional Water Supply Options Through 2060: We have also successfully collaborated with the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary to develop a comprehensive master list of all major and minor infrastructure investments that are being considered in the region. Our team facilitating their consideration of mixtures of cooperative treated water transfers, coordinated regional conservation, reservoir expansions, reclaimed water, expanded water treatment, and cooperative investments. The Chapel Hill and Cornell teams have integrated these future options into the Research Triangle model and are finalizing results for the first suite of papers to consider planning through 2060. LU/LC and Climate Change: Over the course of this project year, monthly project wide meetings have been used to establish a strategy for how LU/LC projections from U.S. Forest Service, IPCC climate scenarios, and regional hydrology can be combined to form internally consistent scenarios. The Chapel Hill and North Carolina State collaborators supported on the sister NSF WSC grant are leading these efforts. The Cornell team has worked with the collaborators to establish computational tools and frameworks that will aid the collaborative evaluation of all component models. Our team will establish Git source versioning and provide computational resources for intensive ensemble simulations. Detailed scenarios for regional drought, LU/LC, and shifts in demand will be a major in Project Year 2. Water Supply Portfolio Tradeoffs & Vulnerabilities: Our team and Dr. Greg Characklis have published a technical review paper and are working two additional journal papers that are demonstrating how Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary face unique individual vulnerabilities as well as collective regional vulnerabilities. Our team is actively working with the cities to demonstrate pathways where regional cooperation can improve their individual risk profiles as well as the overall regional risk profile. This work is addressing water supply portfolio planning by advancing an innovative multiobjective framework where the utilities can explore "time-adaptive" options that can flexibly shift to address unexpected risks (e.g., shifts in demands or sustained droughts). We summarize the major water supply instruments and time-adaptive risk trigger planning strategies formulated over this project year below. Water use restrictions: Restrictions are triggered through the risk-of-failure (ROF) metric that measures the probability that reservoir levels will fall below 20% of a capacity over the following 52 weeks. The probability of failure is calculated for each utility in every week of the simulation by determining the percentage of discrete streamflow blocks in the 'observed' streamflow record that cause at least one week of 'storage failure' conditions under projected demands. Calculations use a number of blocks equal to the number of years in the observed record, with each block beginning on the current simulation week in each year and ending 52 weeks later. The observed record is created by appending synthetic streamflows that are realized over the course of an individual simulation run onto the historical record. This observed record grows over the course of the simulation so that synthetic streamflow measurements are included in ROF probability calculations after they have been 'observed' during the course of the simulation. Water demand projections take into account growth over time but do not consider the potential effects of temporary conservation. Each utility has a ROF threshold, that, when exceeded, triggers water use restrictions. The magnitude of conservation achieved by water use restrictions is assumed to be the values outlined in the respective utility's water shortage response plan. Infrastructure construction: New infrastructure construction is triggered using a ROF metric that is slightly altered from the metrics used to calculate water use restrictions. The infrastructure risk-of-failure (IROF) metrics are not meant to measure the risk-of-failure of storage conditions at a given point during the simulation, but rather the probability that current infrastructure configurations, when completely full, will fall below 20% of capacity over a 78 week (1.5 year) period. Instead of weekly ROF calculations, the IROF calculation is made once at the beginning of each year with the assumption that reservoirs begin completely full. The discrete streamflow blocks, like those used to calculate ROF, are taken from an observed streamflow record that is created by appending realized synthetic streamflows onto the historical record. Each utility also has a demand buffer with which to make IROF calculations, so that IROF measures the risk-of-failure using demand projections that are a given amount higher than projections for the following 78 weeks of the simulation. Each utility has an IROF threshold, that, when exceeded, triggers an infrastructure choice. Each utility also has a list of infrastructure options, and each of those options has a construction ranking and a construction year. When the simulation year has passed an infrastructure option's construction year, that option is available for construction. If the annual IROF calculation exceeds a utility's given IROF threshold, that utility then looks to the pool of available infrastructure options to begin the construction process. The utility selects the infrastructure option with the lowest construction ranking among those available for construction, at which point that infrastructure option is then removed from the pool of available infrastructure options. After this option is selected, a construction period of 3-5 years must pass before this infrastructure option is considered active for storage calculations within the actual simulation or ROF calculations used to determine water use restrictions. Financial Mitigation: Water use restrictions cause revenue losses that can vary greatly from year-to-year depending on the length and severity of drought. Utilities can mitigate the harmful effect of these swings through either (a) annual payments to a contingency fund that can be used to supplement revenues in years when restrictions are implemented, (b) purchasing third-party insurance contracts that provide utilities with payments under certain conditions that correlate with the lost revenues from restrictions, or (c) some combination of the two. Contingency fund payments are made each year as a percentage of annual revenue, and the funds carry over from year-to-year, accumulating 5% interest annually. Third party insurance payments are based on streamflow indices and predicted withdrawals that can be used to estimate reservoir storage. When these indices drop below a given threshold, payouts occur. The annual cost of these contracts is equal to the expected value of payouts plus a risk/return premium based in part on the volatility of the expected payouts.

    Publications

    • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Herman, J., Reed, P., Zeff, H., and Characklis, G. (2015). "How Should Robustness Be Defined for Water Systems Planning under Change?." J. Water Resour. Plann. Manage. , 10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000509 , 04015012.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: J.D. Herman, P.M. Reed, H.B. Zeff, and G.W. Characklis. How should robustness be defined for water systems planning under change? AGU Fall Meeting, December 2014.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Zeff, H.B., Herman, J., Reed, P., and Characklis, G., "Integrating adaptive water management techniques with hard storage development: a financial approach.", Environmental Water Resources Institute, ASCE World Water and Environmental Congress, 2015.
    • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Herman, J., Zeff, H.B., Reed, P., and Characklis, G., "How should robustness be defined for water systems planning under change?.", Environmental Water Resources Institute, ASCE World Water and Environmental Congress, 2015.