A Planning Support System for a Sustainable Water Supply Network: A Case Study of Multicriteria Analysis Supported by GIS

Ensuring a reliable and sustainable water supply in growing urban areas requires integrated planning that balances increasing demand with technical, economic, and operational constraints. This paper presents the development of a Planning Support System to support decision-making in the expansion of urban water distribution networks. The proposed framework links urban development strategies with future water demand assessment, spatial analysis, hydraulic modeling, and structured evaluation of alternative network expansion scenarios. Geographic Information Systems are used to identify potential growth areas and estimate future demand based on urban planning documents, while hydraulic simulations are performed using the Water Network Tool for Resilience to assess network performance under projected operating conditions. The generated variants are subsequently evaluated using selected Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis methods, considering factors such as investment costs, energy consumption, supply security, and network resilience. A case study demonstrates the applicability of the proposed Planning Support System and confirms its effectiveness in providing a transparent and replicable basis for supporting strategic decisions in water supply network sustainable development.