REACTION PAPER : US Environmental Protection Agency Uses Operations Research to Reduce

Contamination Risks in Drinking Water

A. The US Environmental Protection Body (EPA) is the federal agency in charge of ensuring the
safety of drinking water in the US. The organization is in charge of providing information and
technical help to the country's more than 50,000 water utilities. The paper discussed the reduction
of contamination risk in drinking water using operation research conducted by the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Operation Research (OR) is the process of supplying
accurate data to solve critical problems. Drinking-water utilities are naturally vulnerable to
terrorist-caused pollution because of their dispersed physical layout. The EPA is employing
operations research to build, test, and implement contamination warning systems (CWSs) that
quickly detect the hazard contaminants found in drinking water. Through this Operation
Research Technique, EPA created a software tool to help utilities optimize the design process,
published a decision-making process to assist utilities to use the tool, conducted test runs on nine
large water utilities, and provided training and technical assistance to a larger group of utilities. To
assess the methodology and share CWS deployment experiences, EPA organized a collaborative
team of industry, academia, and government. Using the Operation Research Technique and with
the collaboration of EPA and American Water Works Association (AWWA) the TEVA-SPOT
software was developed. The TEVA-SPOT program provides a flexible choice framework for
sensor placement, which consists of two key steps: modeling and the decision-making process.
By using this software The user can provide possible sensor locations and fix existing sensor
positions during optimization.

B. The EPA's TEVA research program has brought together a broad group of people from
throughout the country to show that CWSs can be used to reduce the risk of contamination in
water distribution systems. This contamination water system is being used to improve the
security of the water that is delivered to millions of people in the US. The study has shown that a
CWS can detect a wide spectrum of contaminants in a cost-effective, fast, and capable manner.
The widespread use of these innovative techniques will significantly lower the likelihood of
catastrophic contamination incidents: the median estimated fatality reduction for the nine utilities
currently evaluated is 48 percent, with a corresponding economic impact reduction of over $19
billion. The team behind the TEVA-SPOT software has been a strong advocate for the
application of operations research in the water sector.

C. Through mathematical analysis, operation research is utilized to address complicated business

problems. The study emphasizes the importance and effectiveness of the technique. In this
project, operations research influenced all stages of the solution process. The EPA's ability to
tackle sensor-placement challenges for large-scale water-distribution systems was aided by
operations research. This technique is also the main reason why the TEVA-SPOT software is
created. This method can be applied to a variety of industries, including agriculture, production,
company management, global health challenges, and even disaster management. Ordinary
software and data analytics techniques do not provide a more powerful approach to decision-
making than operations research does. Using operations research professionals can assist
businesses in compiling more comprehensive datasets, considering all available options,
predicting all possible outcomes, and estimating risk. Furthermore, operations research can be
adjusted to specific business processes or use cases to discover which methodologies are most
suited to solving the problem.

D. The strategic placement of sensors throughout the water-distribution network is a fundamental

problem that needs solving for developing a successful CWS. The desired sensor placement (SP)
 minimizes the possible economic and public health implications of a contamination incident when
there are a restricted number of sensors. Another hindrance in this paper is the limited memory
of the sensor placement. For real-world distribution networks with tens of thousands of junctions,
the memory required to record the contamination impact data could be extremely high. As the
number of nodes and contamination episodes increases, the SP's memory expands polynomially.

E. Online monitoring programs, such as a CWS, are now the acknowledged technique for
decreasing contamination concerns in drinking water as a result of this operations research study.
In the Philippine setting Operation Research can be of big help in deciding on complicated
problems. This technique can be applied to a variety of industries, including agriculture,
production, company management, health challenges here in the country, and also Operation
Research (OR) can be used in determining which strategies are best appropriate to tackle an
issue.

References:

Kiradoo, Giriraj, Use of Operation Research Techniques in Managerial Decision Making (2015).
International Journal of Management (IJM), Volume 6, Issue 6, June (2015), pp. 57-63, Available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3578443

Alicja Bałut, Andrzej Urbaniak (2017). Application of the TEVA-SPOT in designing the monitoring of
water networks. Available from:
https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2018/34/e3sconf_ciwt2017_00009.pdf