1. The next Analytics for a Better World Webinar (ABW-W) is on Wednesday, October 28, 2020,
EDT 12:00 PM (Boston time), CET 5:00 PM (Amsterdam time).
Speaker: Jean-Philippe Vial (Geneva, Switzerland)
Title: Analytics for the Design of Gravity-Driven Water Distribution Systems for Poor Rural Communities: the NeatWork Tool.
Abstract: NeatWork is an optimization and simulation tool for the design of water-distribution systems with the aim of providing clean water to poor rural communities. The management of such systems must be cheap and simple, a requirement which prohibits power-driven equipment, such as pumps, and man-operated devices, such as regulators. Therefore, the physical system must be driven by gravity only. It must also be endowed with self-regulation to ensure flow invariance despite stochastic intermittent water withdrawals by independent users. The formulation as a least-cost design problem belongs to the realm of two-stage stochastic optimization, in which the second stage involves calculating flows as solutions of a system of nonlinear equations. The formulation and resolution of this complex stochastic programming problem goes far beyond the target application of the tool. Instead, NeatWork proposes a heuristic to generate designs in a first module, and a simulation tool in a second module for testing the flow patterns under large samples of realistic uses of the system. NeatWork has been used routinely for the past 15 years at Agua Para La Vida (APLV), a nongovernmental organization operating in Nicaragua. Despite the complexity of its stochastic approach, the tool is routinely used by technicians without supervision by qualified engineers.
Joint work with: Frédéric Babonneau, Gilles Corcos, Laurent Drouet,
Please click the link below to join the webinar (this link will be also be the link for future webinars):
https://mit.zoom.us/j/95032457938 SIP: 95032457938@zoomcrc.com
2. The videos of all previous ABW-Ws can be found on this new ABW website: www.analyticsbw.org
This website is still under construction, and more ABW initiatives will be added to this website in the future, but at least you can already found the announcement of new webinars, and videos of all old ones. Moreover, this website also offers the opportunity to register for this ABW-W series. If you already have registered in the past, then there is no need to register again. We will continue sending you e-mails about upcoming webinars.
Kind regards,
Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT, Cambridge, US)
Dick den Hertog (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)