Operational Water Quality Management: Beyond Planning and Design

Beck, M.B. (1981). Operational Water Quality Management: Beyond Planning and Design. IIASA Executive Report. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: ER-81-007

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Abstract

Developing effective means of managing water quality operationally has become a desirable and necessary objective, particularly for water resource systems that are used intensively. The preliminary steps toward achieving this objective are the subject of this report.

Two factors make this an opportune time to assess the desirability and feasibility of operational water quality management: the convergence between theory and practice and the changes affecting water pollution problems. These changes include the growing scale and increasingly complex infrastructure of water quality management; transition from single, independent objectives to interacting, multiple objectives; growing concern for preventing transient pollution events; the changing role of treatment plants; the introduction of more complex and comprehensive water quality standards; and the increasingly difficult economic climate.

Traditionally, there has been a tendency to consider the individual components of a water quality system -- abstraction, purification, and supply of potable water; the sewer network; wastewater treatment; and the receiving water body -- as separate entities requiring largely independent management polices. An examination of current and prospective problems and a review of current practice in water quality management reveal the need for improving, integrating, and coordinating these individual policies. The report covers the advances in analysis and understanding that will shape and facilitate future applications of operational management. It also identifies six principal components of an approach to operational water quality management: advances in economic analysis, with special reference to considering fixed and variable costs jointly; analysis of interactions and reliability; process control system synthesis, in which the study of design-operation interactions is especially important; the use of support services in operational decision making; on-line monitoring, estimation, and forecasting; and computing and on-line control.

The report concludes with observations about the desirable attributes of water quality management and with recommendations (classified as institutional, economic, technical, reliability, and professional) for realizing the full potential of operational management.

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