AWWA JTMGT61337

The Butler County Department of Environmental Services (BCDES) is a regional supplier of drinking water in southwestern Ohio with approximately 34,000 customer accounts. The service area has been consistently increasing over the last 20 years and growth is expected to continue at a rapid pace in the future. To address the rapid growth, BCDES has undertaken a Water System Master Plan to identify and plan for improvements beyond 2022. As a wholesale water purchaser and wholesale provider, BCDES faces unique operational and planning challenges. They currently purchase water from two different regional suppliers and are governed by contractual conditions with each supplier, including minimum purchase requirements. There are three main supply connection points with the water suppliers. Future improvements will add at least two more major supply connections to provide redundancy in the BCDES system and to enhance the suppliers' ability to deliver peak flows through flow splitting. This significant planning project could not have been done without several meetings, frequent communication, and computer modeling coordination with each supplier. Communication between the water suppliers and BCDES staff is needed on an on-going basis to ensure the availability of supply to meet the demands of the growing area. The use of advanced geographic information systems (GIS), hydraulic modeling, and optimization tools allowed for quick and detailed analysis of alternatives, providing valuable information for decision makers. However, factors such as operational flexibility and redundancy cannot be ignored in the analysis, particularly for systems such as BCDES that rely on external water suppliers. The use of cutting-edge tools such as genetic algorithm (GA) analysis enabled BCDES to analyze several hundred thousand alternative configurations of the proposed improvements while traditional approaches would have resulted in only a few alternatives being evaluated. The GA analysis provided BCDES with confidence that the recommended improvements will make the most efficient use of their limited funding resources while ensuring reliable supply of water now and into the distant future. Includes figures.