A strategy for sustainable urban water management using water network partitioning with optimal booster pump configuration: A case study

Abstract

The functionality of water distribution networks (WDNs) plays an important role in preserving human welfare and the sustainable development of cities and society. Like administrative units in urban governance models, a large-scale WDN is partitioned into district metered areas (DMAs) to improve operation and management efficiency. Conventional approaches for water network partitioning (WNP) into DMAs mainly focus on the determination of DMA sizes and configurations (i.e., the clustering phase). They subsequently form a set of boundary pipes to optimally locate flowmeters and gate valves (i.e., the sectorization phase) aimed at minimizing costs and water leakage and improving network reliability. Alternatively, this paper presents a new approach that considers the phasing of the optimal booster pump installation combined with the design of a DMA configuration aimed at optimizing the operation cost and hydraulic performance. The proposed method combines the overall sectorization process to simultaneously optimize the locations of the flowmeters, gate valves, and booster pumps, as well as the pump sizes. The proposed method was applied to a real-world WDN and the results showed two advantages: first, the boundary pipes are good candidate locations for booster pump installation, which makes it possible to improve hydraulic performance; and second, operation costs are reduced when compared to those of the source-connecting central pump configuration. This study provides a methodology to select the most suitable pumping configurations for DMA design/operation in WDNs.