Global resilience analysis of water distribution systems

Kegong Diao,Chris Sweetapple,Raziyeh Farmani,Guangtao Fu,Sarah Ward,David Butler

doi:10.1016/j.watres.2016.10.011

Kegong Diao, Chris Sweetapple + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2016.10.011

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Journal: Water research	Publication Date: Oct 4, 2016
Citations: 148	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: University of Exeter, De Montfort University

Abstract

Evaluating and enhancing resilience in water infrastructure is a crucial step towards more sustainable urban water management. As a prerequisite to enhancing resilience, a detailed understanding is required of the inherent resilience of the underlying system. Differing from traditional risk analysis, here we propose a global resilience analysis (GRA) approach that shifts the objective from analysing multiple and unknown threats to analysing the more identifiable and measurable system responses to extreme conditions, i.e. potential failure modes. GRA aims to evaluate a system's resilience to a possible failure mode regardless of the causal threat(s) (known or unknown, external or internal). The method is applied to test the resilience of four water distribution systems (WDSs) with various features to three typical failure modes (pipe failure, excess demand, and substance intrusion). The study reveals GRA provides an overview of a water system's resilience to various failure modes. For each failure mode, it identifies the range of corresponding failure impacts and reveals extreme scenarios (e.g. the complete loss of water supply with only 5% pipe failure, or still meeting 80% of demand despite over 70% of pipes failing). GRA also reveals that increased resilience to one failure mode may decrease resilience to another and increasing system capacity may delay the system's recovery in some situations. It is also shown that selecting an appropriate level of detail for hydraulic models is of great importance in resilience analysis. The method can be used as a comprehensive diagnostic framework to evaluate a range of interventions for improving system resilience in future studies.

Highlights

There is an emerging realisation that building resilience is an important component of enhancing the sustainability of many systems, including water systems (Ahern, 2011; Pickett et al, 2014)
The global resilience analysis (GRA) results for the three failure modes are presented in Figs. 3e5, showing the magnitude of stress applied against the magnitude of strain on the system
This paper proposes a new method, global resilience analysis (GRA), and applies it to water distribution systems (WDSs)

Summary

Introduction

There is an emerging realisation that building resilience is an important component of enhancing the sustainability of many systems, including water systems (Ahern, 2011; Pickett et al, 2014). Engineering resilience can be broadly characterised in two related but distinct ways: attribute-based and performance-based. The former typically concerns the system as a whole and could be considered as a set of design principles, such as the degree of interconnectedness or duplication, which enables the system to respond appropriately to any threat. The latter refers to the agreed performance of the system (or part of the system) in responding to a particular threat. The degree to which the various attributes of a system build the standard of performance required is still a matter of ongoing research but this requires a detailed understanding of whole-system resilience

Methods

Results

Conclusion