The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to be the largest producer of petroleum in the world and is experiencing rapid population growth at the same time. The current population is approaching 30 million residents and demand for resources such as clean water and electricity is increasing at a rate of approximately 7% per year. Saudi  Arabia is investing heavily in new infrastructure projects to meet current and future demands that require substantial capital investment and will consume natural resources. Satisfying these demands requires a robust set of linked infrastructures that should be of comparable quality and availability across the 13 regions of the kingdom.

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The Sustainable Infrastructure Planning System (SIPS) project aims to develop new frameworks and software tools for analyzing multi-domain infrastructure decisions in an integrated way taking into account the couplings that exist, particularly between water and energy.  The initial emphasis of the project is on the water infrastructure and the objective is to develop a system dynamics (SD) model as well as an Agent-Based Model (ABM)  combined in a hybrid approach to model  water supply and demand at the macro-scale. . At the micro-scale an initial facility-based multi-commodity flow network (MCFN) model is implemented.

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To assess the sustainability of the different decisions and their effects to the complex system, multiple sustainability Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are developed. Furthermore, multiple methodologies and techniques such as stochastic simulation are utilized to simulate uncertainty and evaluate possible decision impacts and possible future scenarios. Finally, a web-based collaborative planning interface (CPI) is used to allow stakeholders to interact with different decision variables and to analyze and visualize the different KPIs resulting from the simulation.



S I P S

Sustainable Infrastructure Planning System