A Review of the Conceptual Framework of the Interactive Cycle and Modeling Process Used in Urban Water Management

Water demand management policies have widespread positive and negative effects on various aspects and can affect the severity and extent of these effects by affecting various components of system. Also, the application of these policies to social systems, which are composed of adaptable factors with complex behaviors (indirect effects) and interact with each other on micro-scale, causes emerging phenomena at system-level (macro-scale). In addition to the complicates of inner nature of socio-ecological systems and urban water supply-demand cycle, the complicates of urban infrastructure behaviors also present another challenge in this area. Therefore, urban water system is known as a complex adaptive system that requires integrated evaluation and modeling of system complexities in different dimensions. So, this article reviews the two main concepts regarding evaluation and modeling of environmental policies, including urban water management policies, namely (1)modeling of complex adaptive systems and (2)integrated evaluation and modeling and the types of common approaches of them. By reviewing these concepts and previous researches in the field of urban water management, the interactive cycle and modeling process in this field is extracted. This paper begins with an introduction to the importance of urban water management, especially demand management, and continues with an overview of the basic requirements and concepts in the structure of assessment and modeling of environmental policies. The proposed framework is then presented based on past researches. At the end, agent-based modeling as a powerful tool in evaluation and modeling of urban water management has been investigated using the two approaches above.