Abstract
Water distribution networks are the backbone of any municipal water supply. Their task is to supply the population regardless of the respective demand. High resilience of these infrastructures is of great importance and has brought these infrastructures into the focus of science and politics. At the same time, the data collected is highly sensitive and often openly unavailable. Therefore, researchers have to rely on models that represent the topology of these infrastructures. In this work, a model is developed that allows the topology of an urban water infrastructure to be mapped using the example of Cologne, Germany by combining freely available data. On the one hand, spatial data on land use (local climate zones) are used to disaggregate the water demand within the city under consideration. On the other hand, the parallelism of water and urban transportation infrastructures is used to identify the topology of a network by applying optimization methods. These networks can be analyzed to identify vulnerable areas within urban structures.
Highlights
IntroductionThe topology of water distribution systems (WDS) is highly dependent on the urban structure which they provide for
This work demonstrated the potential of considering geo-referenced data to disaggregate water demands in urban structures to allow for the generation of real-world water distribution systems
The introduced method allows for a significant increase in the data-driven significance of the water demand estimation for the generated water distribution system compared to state-of-the-art methods to estimate the spatial distribution of the water demand
Summary
The topology of water distribution systems (WDS) is highly dependent on the urban structure which they provide for. They are restricted to the common ground, which is mainly the street network. They have to scale with the water demand resulting from the population density. Climate change poses further changes on the availability and demand of water. This is where the question arises in which sense, the phrase “form [...] follows function” [1] applies to the design of water distribution systems
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