Providing water for the poor - towards optimal water supply infrastructures for informal settlements by using remote sensing data

摘要

More than half of the worlds population currently resides in urban areas. In many countries informal settlements are a defining part of the urban scape. Their supply with fresh water is one of the main goals of modern civilizations. To provide an optimal supply system, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary. This paper presents a combined approach to deliver a concept and solution strategy for designing water networks in urban settlements. This approach leverages data of informal settlements provided by remote sensing techniques (visual interpretation of Quickbird satellite imagery) as input to apply methods from mathematical optimization to find optimal supply infrastructures. Hereby, we choose between different central and decentral approaches. For the purpose of illustration, we apply the method on a small slum cluster in Dhaka and found that the optimization provides results for a low cost water supply system. It is also noted that the resulting infrastructure is very sensitive to the input data. The developed optimization model sets a foundation to derive general design recommendations for cities based on different indication numbers which can be calculated from remote sensing data.