Metabolism-based modelling for performance assessment of a water supply system: a case study of Reggio Emilia, Italy

A new class of conceptual simulation tools, as a complement to physically based models, is becoming available to simulate the whole water cycle in urban areas for strategic planning, often involving the allocation of a great amount of financial resources. These simulation tools are required to estimate the impact of the today's decisions on the system performance over the next decades and to compare and rank different intervention strategies. To achieve this, this paper aims to build the metabolism-based modelling of a real water supply system using the recently developed WaterMet² model in order to evaluate long-term performance metrics for possible intervention strategies. This metabolism-based approach was demonstrated for evaluation of the water supply system of Reggio Emilia, Italy, which is one of the demonstration case studies in the EU TRUST (TRansitions to the Urban water Services of Tomorrow) project. Based on the strains imposed by pressing challenges (here population growth) two intervention strategies were analysed. The results obtained show that the built and calibrated WaterMet² model allows a broader understanding of the impacts of alternative intervention strategies taking into account multidimensional aspects of the sustainability beside conventional service performance.