Due to demographic and economic developments, in many rural areas the question has to be raised nowadays, whether existing infrastructures can be used economically in the future and whether they should be obtained as they are, although the underlying conditions may have changed. Especially for water supply and wastewater disposal systems with their long term useful lives finding flexible strategies for transformation is of great importance.

The Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) supports 13 projects within the frame of INIS - "intelligent and multifunctional infrastructure systems for a sustainable water supply and wastewater disposal“ (Intelligente und multifunktionelle Infrastruktursysteme für eine zukunftsfähige Wasserversorgung und Abwasserentsorgung). One of them is called SinOptiKom: "Cross-sectoral process optimization for the transformation of municipal infrastructures“ (Sektorübergreifende Prozessoptimierung in der Transformation kommunaler Infrastrukturen). Under the direction of the Department of Environmental Engineering of the Kaiserslautern Technical University, 10 interdisciplinary partners from the scholarly field, from municipalities and from professional backgrounds are developing a software-based decision model for the long term planning of water supply and wastewater disposal in rural areas. With this tool, different case scenarios (e.g. concerning population and energy development) can be played through. Based on these scenarios, the software calculates an ideal solution, also taking into account weightings the user may have specified (such as costs, flexibility, energy efficiency) and chronologically visualizing the conse-quences through maps and diagrams.During the project set out for three years, - apart from assembling the data base - as one of the pro-fessional partners igr is in charge of the work package “application and evaluation”. In this step of work, the then developed software will be applied to the municipalities of Enkenbach-Alsenborn and Rockenhausen, and the usability for planners and decision makers will be evaluated. Additionally, the applicability to various types of spatial structure is to be evaluated: www.bmbf.nawam-inis.de/de/inisprojekte/sinoptikom



Stefanie Seiffert