Drinking water suppliers have to provide every consumer with the required amount of water at sufficient pressure. To ensure this, Berlin's municipal water supplier Berliner Wasserbetriebe performs a daily forward planning of network operations based on a demand forecast for every hour of the next day. The network has 7800 km of pipelines, 9 waterworks, 8 pumping stations, and more than 250000 house connections.
Goal of the project was the development of an optimization method that computes a minimum cost operation plan of the entire network for the predicted demand profile. The method has been implemented in GAMS and integrated as optimization module into the operational control system of Berliner Wasserbetriebe. It has been in regular operation since January 2005.
