Water is an interface that deals with the optimum design of a distributed wastewater network. Multicomponent streams are considered to be processed by units for reducing the concentration of several contaminants in order to meet the environmental discharge limit. The model gives rise to a nonconvex nonlinear program, which is solved through a mehtod by Galan and Grossmann (1998) that yields a global or near global optima.

Given a set of process liquid streams with known flow rates, that contain certain pollutants in known concentrations, a set of treatment units with specific removal capacities the model then identifies the interconnection of the technologies, and their corresponding flowrates and compositions that will meet the discharge composition regulations for each pollutant at a minimum cost.

WATER is based on the paper 'Optimal Design of Distributed Wastewater Treatment Networks' by B. Galan and I. Grosssmann (1998); and has been developed by Gabriela Garcia Ayala under the supervision of Ignacio E.Grossmann .