Cost versus life cycle assessment-based environmental impact optimization of drinking water production plants.
Empowering decision makers with cost-effective solutions for reducing industrial processes environmental burden, at both design and operation stages, is nowadays a major worldwide concern. The paper addresses this issue for the sector of drinking water production plants (DWPPs), seeking for optimal solutions trading-off operation cost and life cycle assessment (LCA)-based environmental impact while satisfying outlet water quality criteria. This leads to a challenging bi-objective constrained optimization problem, which relies on a computationally expensive intricate process-modelling simulator of the DWPP and has to be solved with limited computational budget. Since mathematical programming methods are unusable in this case, the paper examines the performances in tackling these challenges of six off-the-shelf state-of-the-art global meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, suitable for such simulation-based optimization, namely Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA2), Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), Indicator-based Evolutionary Algorithm (IBEA), Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition (MOEA/D), Differential Evolution (DE), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The results of optimization reveal that good reduction in both operating cost and environmental impact of the DWPP can be obtained. Furthermore, NSGA-II outperforms the other competing algorithms while MOEA/D and DE perform unexpectedly poorly.
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Environmental Research and Innovation (ERIN) Department, 41 rue du Brill, L-4422, Belvaux, Luxembourg. Electronic address: florin.capitanescu@list.lu.
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Capitanescu
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Environmental Research and Innovation (ERIN) Department, 41 rue du Brill, L-4422, Belvaux, Luxembourg.
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Rege
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Environmental Research and Innovation (ERIN) Department, 41 rue du Brill, L-4422, Belvaux, Luxembourg.
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Marvuglia
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Environmental Research and Innovation (ERIN) Department, 41 rue du Brill, L-4422, Belvaux, Luxembourg.
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Benetto
University of Toulouse, INSA, UPS, INP, LISBP, 135 Avenue de Rangueil, F-31077, Toulouse, France.
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Ahmadi
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Environmental Research and Innovation (ERIN) Department, 41 rue du Brill, L-4422, Belvaux, Luxembourg.
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Gutiérrez
University of Toulouse, INSA, UPS, INP, LISBP, 135 Avenue de Rangueil, F-31077, Toulouse, France.
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Tiruta-Barna
D000465:Algorithms; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D060766:Drinking Water; D004777:Environment; D018508:Water Purification / Q000191:economics* / Q000379:methods
D060766:Drinking Water
Drinking water production plant; Environmental impact; Life cycle assessment; Meta-heuristic algorithms; Multi-objective optimization