Topic:- JalTantra: Impacting the practice of rural water network design in India
(Winner of IFORS Prize for OR in Development 2021)
Speaker: Dr. Nikhil Hooda, Upside AI, Network Design & Optimization Expert
Date and Time: 5:30pm, Wednesday, 22nd September 2021
Abstract: JalTantra has changed the practice of rural piped water network design in and beyond the state of Maharashtra, India. Existing tools for water network design look at only pipe diameter optimization and are either difficult to use because of hardware requirements and licensing costs or have limited capabilities developed in the 1990s. Real world networks however also contain components such as tanks, pumps and valves whose parameters require a careful selection. JalTantra takes a deterministic and optimal approach to the overall design and is developed as a free to use web application. The problem is modeled as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program. The simultaneous consideration of pipes, tanks, pumps and valves results in a complex model for network sizes of practical importance. The time taken to optimize an example 150 node network was 40 minutes and a 200 node network could not be solved within 24 hours. Several reformulations were introduced to produce a much tighter model, resulting in the two networks taking just 5 and 70 seconds respectively. Developed in partnership with water supply engineers, JalTantra is an example of how the university can help government departments in carrying out their developmental duties. JalTantra has been successfully deployed by government engineers for designing rural water networks and due to its minimum cost design, saves the government 100s of millions of Indian Rupees each year. It is now part of the training curriculum of these engineers.
About the Speaker: Nikhil Hooda did his PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). He also holds a BTech in Computer Science from IITB. His research mainly focused on the design and optimization of multi village piped water schemes. He is currently working at a fintech startup Upside AI.
The talk is being organised jointly by Operational Research Society of India Mumbai Chapter & Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, IIT Bombay.
Joining Details: Join Now
Meeting ID: 987 2407 0053
Passcode: 365951