A Decision Guidance System for Optimal Infrastructure Investments

We design and develop an extensible model and a decision guidance system for making actionable recommendations on investments in heterogeneous infrastructure service networks. The model expresses the cash flows, as well as performance indicators, such as total cost of ownership and carbon emissions, as a function of both investment and operational controls within physical constraints of heterogeneous infrastructures and of balancing resource flows. Uniquely, it is designed to make Pareto-optimal investment decisions under the assumption of optimal operational controls over the time horizon. We also develop an extensible library of domain-specific operational analytic models for infrastructure components, initially for desalination and water systems, including pumps, renewable energy sources, water and power storage, and Reverse Osmosis desalination units. Finally, we conduct and report on a feasibility study for this domain to demonstrate the ability to solve realistic size problems.