Long term uncertainties in combination with long lifetime of assets of drinking water infrastructures (DWIs) and changing expectations of stakeholders make strategic decisions in drinking water infrastructures (DWIs) complex. A framework with building blocks and design spaces was developed to support these decisions. Building blocks, divided in governance and system properties, were generic resilience enhancing design principles found in literature. The design spaces were defined by characteristics (water quantity, water quality and environmental impact), and the scale dimension. The DWI design principles framework was operationalised in a case study. The case showed that the DWI design principles framework was useful for strategic issues and the results were recognised and accepted by a diverse group of stakeholders. It may also be possible to apply the framework for other water infrastructures with comparable characteristics and dimensions. @en

Societal infrastructures are the lifeblood of societies, and the sustainability of
infrastructures is very important. Societal infrastructures can experience conflicting spatial claims with other societal infrastructures, disturbing the sustainable situation. The objective of this paper is to design large infrastructures, with a focus on the Drinking Water Infrastructure (DWI), in a more sustainable way by using the resilience concept. To study this, a case study was done in the Netherlands, where an overlap is present between the DWI and the protection zones, and a new railroad and water safety measures in the river IJssel. The case showed that conflicting infrastructures are inflexible and unable to adapt to change due to several reasons in the governance and in the infrastructure system itself. The case was useful for identifying eight design principles to prevent conflicting claims between large infrastructures.@en

A significant challenge for managers of drinking water infrastructures is to make effective strategic decisions for assets with a long lifetime in an uncertain and changing environment. Water resources, which are part of the drinking water infrastructures, have a special position in this decision making process as they operate at the interface of the socio-technical and the socio-ecological subsystems: water resources are the input for the technical system, consisting of pipes and pumps that interact with different actors; and water resources can be seen as output from the ecological system which is influenced by environmental and political issues like climate change, drought and competing and changing uses of water and space. This paper discusses how to design the water resources in such a way that they function in the desired way at present, but that the design also fits an uncertain future as good as possible. To this extent, a framework was developed based upon the notion of resilience. Existing general design principles for socio-technical systems from literature were used as building blocks in the development of our water resources design principles (WR-DP) framework. Three key characteristics of water resources were distinguished in this framework: water quantity, water quality and the environmental impact of the water resources. In addition, we distinguished two dimensions that allowed us to explicitly describe all possible design principles: system scale and class. The first dimension, system scale, ranges from one water resource to a network of water resources. The second dimension, class, makes a distinction between social aspects and technical aspects. Application of the WR-DP framework in a case of a drinking water company in the Netherlands showed the usability of the framework.

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The object of this article is the drinking water infrastructure (DWI), a critical societal infrastructure. To make effective decisions it is important to characterise and understand the complexity of DWI systems. DWI systems can be seen as a system of systems, consisting of the social-ecological system and the social-technical system. The social-ecological system determines the location and seize of the water resources, while the social-technical system is about the technical infrastructure. The two systems with different characteristics must align to work effective together in the DWI system. The tension between different lifecycles of the assets and dynamic changes in both systems, the time of change, is important to take into account. The SoPhyTech infra framework was developed based on the two systems and time of change. The advantages of applying the SoPhyTech infra framework is studied in a case comparing two very different DWI systems: Indonesia (Semarang) and the Netherlands (Vitens). The SoPhyTech infra framework was shown to be effective for characterising a DWI system with different interacting lifecycles in different systems and it is expected that it also can be used to characterise other infrastructure systems.

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