A decision support tool for water and energy saving in the integrated water system

In the last decades, a growing attention on energy saving associated with water resources usage and leakages reduction has been recorded at both national and international level. Scientific research has focused on implementation of several methodologies aimed at the understanding of energy transformation processes occurring in the integrated water system.The main concern is then identifying energy impacts associated to each macro-area of integrated water system, such as collection, treatment and distribution, and analysing the potential interactions between them. Unfortunately, only overall energy consumptions are usually available at national level. The main objective of the paper is to present a decision support tool, developed in the framework of the ALADIN project, able to analysing the water and energy balance in the integrated water service. In order to achieve a sustainable use of water resources, the tool allows an assessment of the energy impact of different macro - areas of integrated water system. Moreover, each macro - area can be treated as an element able to share energy with other elements, aiming to obtain an energy saving on the whole integrated water system. In this way, the decision support tool could suggest efficient solutions, according to the operator objectives, with regard to energy and water losses management. Therefore, the tool could provide guidelines for choosing the best management solutions, depending on the particular analysed system, and allow, at the same time, the energy and water resources saving. The proposed tool was applied to a complex water supply system, the Favara di Burgio system (Sicily, Italy) in order to show its reliability. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.