A Planning Model for Optimal Deployment of Leak Sensors in a Water Pipeline Network

Abstract

When leak sensors are actually mounted on water pipelines, they are deployed at auxiliary equipment such as gate valves and fire hydrants located every few hundred meters. The total length of the water pipelines laid throughout Japan is approximately 650,000 km. Assuming a length of several thousand kilometers for a pipeline in a given target area, the possible locations for deploying sensors can number in the tens of thousands. Mounting sensors at all the possible locations would not be efficient, either economically or from a maintenance standpoint. In a pipeline network that spreads out horizontally, it is important to ensure that the sensors are deployed in a way to maximize their effectiveness at detecting water leakages. To this end, a method is needed for objectively planning the deployment of a given number of sensors on the optimal gate valves and hydrants. This study, aimed at the optimal deployment of leak sensors in a water pipeline network, proposes a planning model applying the k-median problem, a type of mathematical optimization problem, and verifies the effectiveness of this model via case studies.