Toward development of open-source models of decision support systems for water demand management in Egypt

Managing the increasing water demands in Egypt, with limited water resources, urges Egypt to find innovative and sustainable approaches for management, and make use of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) to build decision support systems (DSS). The main objective of this paper is to develop a DSS tools, using open-source GIS software, to facilitate water resource planners to effectively manage water demands in the agriculture sector, which consumes more than 80% of water resources in Egypt. Several open-source software tools was investigated, utilized and developed, to support modeling water resources and estimating water demands. Open-source software was adopted to make use of its technical and social advantages and to speed-up the dissemination of GIS knowledge and technology at the different individual and organizational levels. In addition, it also saves economical resources and allows more opportunities for learning and employment in the ICT fields. The study concluded that the developed open-source GIS and DSS tools are capable of modeling, monitoring, and estimating agriculture water demands. It can also analyze and optimize different scenarios for cropping patterns, based on different objectives, considering the fluctuation in the available water resource. The developed optimization model results in saving up to 5% of the agriculture water consumption, by re-allocating crops to the least water consumption locations.