Open Collections

Kaur, Manjot

University of British Columbia

Globally, rapid population growth and urbanization have been observed over the past few decades. This rapid growth raises urban development expectations; therefore, urban densification has become a promising approach for sustainable development. Urban densification can help achieve several sustainability goals by reducing land use, energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and urbanization cost. It also claims the best use of existing buried water infrastructure (BWI) (i.e., drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater) to meet the demand for water services. However, cities are facing several challenges due to increased densification. Urban densification inherits various environmental and health impacts, such as air pollution, congestion, urban heat island effects, loss of tree canopy, and traffic accidents. Furthermore, it is imposing continuous pressure on the existing BWI. More specifically, the challenges related to BWI include improper urban water supply and drainage services. All growing cities around the world are facing challenges in providing and maintaining the adequate performance of BWI. This research developed a decision support system to identify, predict, and improve the performance of BWI under urban densification. The research entails four phases. Phase 1 identified the impacts of densification and proposed a conceptual model, which provides a template to assess the performance. Phase 2 identified performance indicators (PIs) and established a self and comparative performance assessment model to evaluate the integrated level of service (ILOS) index of BWI. Phase 3 adopted a hybrid approach using empirical models to conduct the temporal analysis. Phase 4 developed an optimization model to identify optimal levels of the control PIs (CPIs). The results of this research will provide a foundation for enhanced decision-making to set performance standards at different levels of BWI hierarchy. Moreover, the proposed decision support system can provide best management practices to perform trade-offs between BWI performance and cost while mitigating the impacts of densification for sustainable development.

Text

2022-06-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/81804

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/