Behavioural Modelling of Household Water Consumption for Effective Water Supply and Management

In this era of science and technology population is moving towards urban infrastructure. The agenda of Urbanization refers have basic infrastructure and services like delivery of safe water, waste management, energy, health, school facility and public safety. Idea of urbanization stands under the umbrella of having resilient and sustainable urban infrastructure, that can insure the availability of critical resources. Water being one of the critical resource, needs to be made sustainable and resilient to meet both domestic and commercial requirements in an urban infrastructure. To make water resources sustainable we need to perform modeling and simulation of water in an urban infrastructure.

Agent based (AB)[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span> CITATION Lin131 \l 1033 <span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif] and System Dynamics (SD) modeling and simulation technique will be used for forecasting demand profile of household water. Pakistan being water stressed country needs to take steps in effective management and conservation of water resources. In order to achieve the above-mentioned objective, it is necessary to know what is our actual demand and how we can manage to fulfill our demand.

Agent Based Modeling

AB consists of agents, each entity that consumes water in a household is made an agent because it is rather easy in modeling in simulation to replicate agents i.e. generate number of agents or a population of agent. A person itself is an agent that is a population of agent can be generated while using agent based modeling.

System Dynamics Modeling

System Dynamics consists of stocks and flows, so flow of water can be best modeled by using System Dynamics Modeling. Water reservoirs such as water tanks can be modeled as stocks and consumption of water is best modeled by using flows, that show the flow of water in a house.