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In several areas, many social, economic, and physical subsystems interact around water resources. Integrated water management is applied to maximize economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems, mainly in hydrologic-stressed areas. The Souss-Massa basin, with its semi-arid climate, has a significant demand for agricultural, industrial, tourism, and domestic water. It constitutes a complex system where the lack of knowledge of all the interacting subsystems has led to a shortage of water in quantity and quality. The objective of this study is to investigate the interactions between supply and demand at different stages using a System Dynamics (SD) approach. The model developed promotes a holistic understanding of the interactions between the different problem indicators that operate in water resources management in order to support decision-making action and successfully manage water resources at the Souss-Massa basin scale. The chosen performance indicator is based on the achievement of a baseline sustainability index (SI) defined as the ratio of available water to supply water that should be higher than 20% to avoid a water stress situation. The multisource data were gathered from different government agencies for the period spanning between 2007 and 2020. The results showed that the current policies do not lead to sustainable water management. Groundwater withdrawals have increased considerably, from 747 Mm3 in 2007 to 4884 Mm3 in 2020. The balance between water supply and demand is only reached for three years, 2010, 2015, and 2018, without ever reaching an SI of 20%. The sensitivity analysis showed that the sustainability of water resources in the Souss-Massa basin is mainly impacted by the availability of surface water, irrigated areas, and irrigation efficiency. This study will be of great interest to policymakers to provide optimal and sustainable water management strategies based on improved water use efficiency, and to contribute to the sustainable development agenda in arid and semi-arid regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Efficient water resources management is an issue of major importance in the field of sustainable development, especially in the agricultural sector which represents the main consumer through irrigations. Therefore irrigation management is an important and innovating area which was the subject of several research and studies. Modeling, and more particularly, the Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), allows better representing the multiplicity of these actors, the diversity of their roles and their interactions. The main reason why we chose the agent technology in the field of gravity irrigation systems, is the complexity to manage in real-time the water distribution operations those arrive asynchronously and dynamically and to be reactive and adaptive to the dynamic and unpredictable events that characterizes the field (mainly rainy advents). Our objectives are mainly located on two levels. The first one, concerns the gravity irrigation modeling by a multi-agent technology and the agent modeling through AML language. The second one focuses on the irrigations scheduling optimization using an evolutionary algorithm. Comparisons between schedules before and after optimization are made and the results shows that our approach can be considered as an efficient tool for planning irrigation schedules by considering crops water needs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]