| Although the literature recognizes the importance of stakeholder input, particularly during requirements elicitation, its implementation has been limited, particularly in addressing the needs of urban water systems. Urban water system resilience, the capacity of a water system to survive, adapt, and grow despite experiencing chronic stresses and acute shocks, has become an increasingly vital component of community plans and operations in addressing community needs and changing climate conditions. Despite growing water system resilience efforts, requirements elicitation from a broad range of stakeholders has not been prioritized and current stakeholder requirements elicitation for urban water systems often excludes important stakeholders, particularly at a grassroots level. As a result, existing resilience quantification efforts neglect to account for stakeholder engagement during requirements elicitation beyond conceptual value. Recent water crises have revealed that excluding such community stakeholders in the early stages of the decision making process can have an adverse effect on the entire community. The primary object of this work is to examine the impact of expanding the urban water system requirements elicitation process to include community stakeholders early in the decision-making process on urban resilience efforts in decision-making and engineering accountability. This study analyzes the relationship between the stakeholder engagement component of the requirements elicitation process and system outcomes. From an analysis of case study cities, the Participatory Implementable Engineering (PIE) Index and Participatory Implementable Engineering (PIE) Matrix were developed to quantify the stakeholder engagement process for urban water systems. This requirements assessment index expands stakeholder requirements for urban water systems, including stakeholders from the community sector in the earliest stages of engineering decision-making and implementation. The outcome of this work provides a roadmap for future urban resilience strategies, improving urban water management techniques, and engaging a wide spectrum of stakeholder input for better engineering decision-making. |
