Over a dozen studies have examined how households who travel to collect water (about one-quarter of humanity) make choices about where and how much to collect. There is little evidence, however, that these studies have informed rural water supply planning in anything but a qualitative way. In this paper, we describe a new web-based decision support tool that planners or community members can use to simulate scenarios such as (1) price, quality, or placement changes of existing sources, (2) the closure of an existing source, or (3) the addition of a new source. We describe the analytical structure of the model and then demonstrate its possibilities using data from a recent study in rural Meru County, Kenya. We discuss some limits of the current model, and encourage readers and practitioners to explore it and suggest ways in which it could be improved or used most effectively.

十几项研究调查了旅行取水的家庭（约占人类的四分之一）如何选择取水地点和取水量。然而，几乎没有证据表明这些研究以定性的方式为农村供水计划提供了信息。在本文中，我们描述了一种新的基于Web的决策支持工具，计划者或社区成员可以使用该工具来模拟以下场景：（1）价格，质量或现有货源的位置变更；（2）关闭现有货源，或（3）添加新资源。我们描述了该模型的分析结构，然后使用肯尼亚梅鲁县农村地区的最新研究数据证明了该模型的可能性。我们讨论了当前模型的一些局限性，