This repository contains files for the project that addresses a city-scale resilience challenge:
How could Barcelona improve preparedness for water-stress events?
Instead of jumping directly to one idea, the team followed a full systems-engineering workflow to compare alternatives, formalize requirements, analyze risk, and select a technically feasible concept.
The project is grounded in Barcelona's drought and infrastructure reality:
- Long periods of water scarcity, including a multi-year drought event.
- Household demand around 106 L/person/day with a policy push toward lower usage.
- High dependence on constrained sources (rivers and wells), alongside desalination and reuse.
- Large wastewater outflows that indicate untapped reuse potential.
These conditions make resilience less about one technology and more about selecting a solution that is deployable, maintainable, and acceptable for dense urban housing.
The report documents the following process:
- System Definition Matrix (SDM) to structure needs, objectives, criteria, constraints, and variables.
- Concept generation across five directions:
- Household greywater reuse/recycling
- Reservoir evaporation reduction
- Green roofs/rainwater collection
- Expanded reservoir capacity
- Public awareness/sensitivity campaigns
- Trade-off analysis (desirability, feasibility, viability) to score concepts transparently.
- Requirements engineering (design, functionality, performance, qualitative requirements).
- Conflict analysis to handle requirement tension (e.g., monitoring vs. energy, water savings vs. water quality).
- Functional decomposition + morphological chart to map candidate means and eliminate weak options.
- Risk analysis with Bow-Tie method (example: filter-clogging causes, effects, and mitigations).
- Test and simulation planning at both component and full-system levels.
The selected direction is a greywater filtration and reuse system optimized for residential settings in Barcelona.
- Greywater is collected from apartment outlets and treated for non-potable reuse.
- Reuse targets include activities such as flushing and irrigation.
- The chosen architecture favors a practical balance of space efficiency, maintainability, and cost.
- The design is aligned with apartment-heavy urban typologies where installation footprint matters.
This work demonstrates how systems engineering can turn a broad climate-resilience challenge into an actionable solution path by combining:
- Quantitative comparison of alternatives
- Explicit requirement traceability
- Early risk-driven design decisions
- Verification planning before implementation