Technology
NOAH’s integrated solution is unique in that it can bring together as needed several key elements – hardware, software, data analysis and visualization, advanced AI and optimization modeling, statistical and as necessary physics-based models – for superior data analysis and decision support.
NOAH is predicated on the principle that optimal management and resource allocation requires four essential elements:
Human knowledge
Good data
Accurate predictions
Rigorous optimization models
Our singularly unique decision support system combines real-time data with artificial intelligence (AI) based prediction and optimization management models. This intelligent data-driven system generates important predictions like water demand, water quality, and groundwater elevations.
Accurate forecasting is essential for improving water utility operations and protecting water resources. Formal optimization models are developed, often combined with AI prediction models, to achieve a number of important objectives like maximize water resources protection, minimize operational costs, and maximize the quality of consumer provided water to the extent possible. When necessary, the system can ensure that the optimal solutions reflect real-time conditions by dynamically updating models with real-time data streams.
NOAH has also developed extremely powerful proprietary methods that expand the domain and range of AI prediction and associated optimization models. NOAH continues to develop innovative proprietary methods for superior water management.
Artificial Intelligence
For even the most complex water problems, AI provides predictions previously unimaginable.
AI through proper development “learns” the system behavior of interest by processing representative data patterns through its architecture. AI has numerous significant advantages over more traditional physics-based models. For example, AI is not limited by simplifying mathematical and/or physical assumptions. AI also identifies important cause and effect relationships, substantially improving system understanding, data collection, and model development for improved management.
There are many other significant advantages of AI as used by NOAH, which we are happy to discuss and tailor for each client.
Formal Optimization
Optimization is the most powerful decision-making tool available, one that has garnered Nobel Prizes in Economics.
Optimization formulates the management problem into an equivalent mathematical model that consists of an objective function(s), constraints, and decision variables.
The decision variables are not only the most basic component of the optimization problem; they are the motivation. Decision variables are the human controls for which the decision maker is seeking to identify the optimal values, such as optimal pumping rates for individual wells in a public supply well field.
The constraints are the bounds of the management problem, for example, the maximum available water or the minimum required water supply.
The objective function is what the decision maker seeks to maximize or minimize to the extent possible. Typical objectives are minimizing costs like energy consumption and/or maximizing benefits like water quality.
Mathematically, there may be an infinite number of possible combinations of values for the decision variables but only one true optimal solution.
Optimization not only replaces tedious and often ineffective trial and error approaches that may fail to identify even a good solution, but it is also extremely fast and robust, converging to the solution in real-time. The solution not only tells the decision maker how to operate their system; it also provides valuable insights like how to substantially improve benefits with at times nominal changes to the resources or constraints.
Multi-Objective Optimization and Statistical Uncertainty
NOAH takes optimization to an entirely different level.
As in ordinary life, water managers must simultaneously balance different objectives, many of which compete or conflict with each other. For example, minimizing operational costs may require operating wells with lower water quality. NOAH’s system performs multi-objective optimization, generating the optimal trade-off surface between competing objectives.
While any higher dimensional multi-objective problem can be solved, the generated trade-off surface for two and three objective problems enables decision makers to visualize the complex interplay between the competing objectives.
NOAH’s algorithms identify the single best management solution in accordance with the decision maker’s preferences and considerations.
This rigorous process ensures that all management objectives are optimally balanced.
And to minimize elements of risk, our proprietary multi-objective algorithms explicitly include uncertainties like weather – which can strongly influence critical system conditions like water supply and demand.