Water loss management: a constructivist approach

ABSTRACT

Considering the increasing demand and the water crisis in many countries, loss management in water supply systems seems relevant to all water services. This research set out to build a performance evaluation model to support a sanitation company on the loss management in the water supply systems that it operates, based on the Constructivist Multicriteria Decision Aid Approach (MCDA-C). The model construction followed the three phases of MCDA-C: structuring, actions evaluation and recommendations. The structuring phase resulted in 64 descriptors in four families of fundamental points of view: apparent losses, real losses, operational support, and external relations. At the end of the evaluation phase, the status quo of the water supply system studied was 22.51, within the competitive level judged by the decision-maker. Actions recommendations were designed to improve the status quo performance of those descriptors with compromising performance, judged by the decision-maker as relevant to be improved. Recommendations were important for improving performance in all families of fundamental points of view, resulting in the overall performance of 60.82. This way, the MCDA-C methodology proved to be consistent for the topics covered in this research and confirmed its constructivist assumptions in all the stages developed here: structuring, evaluation and recommendations.

Keywords:
water supply systems; water loss management; performance assessment; MCDA-C