The primary benefits of this project to the public are that it helps private and government organizations become better stewards of taxpayers' dollars and it protects our natural resources. The proposed research and resulting proof-of-concept model for this Phase I effort has enormous potential to assist infrastructure management agencies in drafting and implementing more effective policies and practices related to managing their overall systems. In addition, the proposed tool will allow alternatives to be considered and decisions made in a much shorter span of time without expending real world resources. Other benefits include being able to clearly and visually demonstrate the cause-and-effect relationships among various elements in the overall infrastructure system, as well as enabling better forecasting and planning. OBJECTIVES: On this Phase I project, ViaSim proposes to accomplish the following three (3) technical objectives: (1) Research current tools and techniques for long-term, strategic planning of water/wastewater and electricity infrastructure systems and determine their effectiveness and user-friendliness to verify commercial opportunity, (2) Develop a system dynamics-based simulation tool that captures the entities, variables, and cause-and-effect relationships necessary for long-term, strategic planning of water/wastewater and electricity systems, with a specific focus on helping decision makers understand the impacts of aging, vulnerabilities, and disasters on these systems, and (3) Determine the effectiveness and user-friendliness of the proposed tool and compare it with current tools and techniques to establish marketability of proposed tool.
