A Framework for Sustainable Urban Water Management through Demand and Supply Forecasting: The Case of Istanbul

Murat Yalçıntaş (), Melih Bulu, Murat Küçükvar and Hamidreza Samadi
Additional contact information
Melih Bulu: School of Management and Administrative Sciences, Istanbul Sehir University, Istanbul 34662, Turkey
Murat Küçükvar: Department of Industrial Engineering, Istanbul Sehir University, Istanbul 34662, Turkey
Hamidreza Samadi: Department of Industrial Engineering, Istanbul Sehir University, Istanbul 34662, Turkey

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 8, 1-18

Abstract: The metropolitan city of Istanbul is becoming overcrowded and the demand for clean water is steeply rising in the city. The use of analytical approaches has become more and more critical for forecasting the water supply and demand balance in the long run. In this research, Istanbul’s water supply and demand data is collected for the period during 2006 and 2014. Then, using an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, the time series water supply and demand forecasting model is constructed for the period between 2015 and 2018. Three important sustainability metrics such as water loss to supply ratio, water loss to demand ratio, and water loss to residential demand ratio are also presented. The findings show that residential water demand is responsible for nearly 80% of total water use and the consumption categories including commercial, industrial, agriculture, outdoor, and others have a lower share in total water demand. The results also show that there is a considerable water loss in the water distribution system which requires significant investments on the water supply networks. Furthermore, the forecasting results indicated that pipeline projects will be critical in the near future due to expected increases in the total water demand of Istanbul. The authors suggest that sustainable management of water can be achieved by reducing the residential water use through the use of water efficient technologies in households and reduction in water supply loss through investments on distribution infrastructure.

Keywords: water supply; demand; time-series forecasting; ARIMA; urban water sustainability; Istanbul (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/8/11050/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/8/11050/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:7:y:2015:i:8:p:11050-11067:d:54158

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().