Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Hydrological droughts have affected several cities worldwide. The communities and the decision makers have not only searched for alternative water sources, but also for improving the management of the water available. Despite all the technology and knowledge, managing water resources remains a challenge because of all the uncertainties and the stakeholders involved. This is the case of the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region, where a water supply system, responsible to deliver water to millions of people, operated below the dead pool level for almost a year during a drought event between 2013 and 2015. Therefore, this study borrows the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) from the risk-management literature to estimate if there was a right moment when the water saving policies should have started to avoid the reservoirs’ emptiness. Thus, the FMEA methodology was combined with a system dynamic model to represent the reservoir’s processes and find the Risk Priority Number (RPN) that indicates such moment. The optimization demonstrated that the RPN equal to 550 would be the target to start the water saving policies, observed at the drought period, and avoid the reservoir from reaching the dead pool level. Finally, an alternative scenario considering the ideal RPN concludes that the FMEA would have led decision makers to start those policies 3 months in advance in comparison to the baseline.