Abstract
Exploring the trade-off between cost and system reliability of water distribution systems (WDSs) has been focused for two decades. Due to the intensive computation associated with the reliability analysis, it is popular in the research community to replace this procedure by using surrogate indicators. However, the discussion on the correlation among different types of such indicators is generally lacking, which implies that a deeper understanding of this aspect is needed. This paper proposes a novel methodology of investigating the relationships among many commonly used surrogate indicators for measuring the mechanical reliability of WDSs. In particular, the optimal design of WDSs is formulated as a many-objective optimization problem, using cost and each surrogate indicator as an individual goal. Two benchmark design problems of different scales and complexities are considered for verifying the proposed method. The well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA), namely Borg that is suitable for coping with problems involving many objectives, is used to obtain the best approximation to the Pareto-optimal fronts for both cases. Afterward, the one-pipe burst testing is conducted to quantify the correlation between mechanical reliability and surrogate indicators. Results suggest that investigating the correlation of surrogate indicators from the perspective of many-objective optimization provides a direct and efficient way of distinguishing better indicators from worse ones. Resilience-based surrogate indicators and the Redundancy indicator that only depends on nodal pressures are highly related to the mechanical reliability of WDSs. In contrast, entropy-based indicators exhibit poor performance in reflecting the mechanical reliability. These insights contribute to the selection of more appropriate surrogate indicators for the optimal design of WDSs for researchers and practitioners.
Highlights
Water Distribution Systems (WDSs), which are regarded as “lifeline engineering” along with other utilities, may be the most critical infrastructures of modern cities
The main concern is to quantify the correlation between surrogate indicators and their relationship with cost and reliability, based on the consistency indicator described in the Section of Methodology
This paper proposed an innovative way of identifying the relationships among various surrogate indicators for assessing the mechanical reliability of WDSs
Summary
Water Distribution Systems (WDSs), which are regarded as “lifeline engineering” along with other utilities (e.g., gas, electricity), may be the most critical infrastructures of modern cities. Water utilities are vulnerable to a wide range of human-caused and natural disasters, such as pipe breakage due to improper operation, firefighting, and earthquake [1]. As such, it is imperative for water utility managers and decision-makers to take the reliability of the network into consideration during the design stage. Reliability has been the most prevailing indicator for measuring the performance of WDSs. Reliability has been the most prevailing indicator for measuring the performance of WDSs It is generally defined as the probability of a given system to continuously meet the demand of its customers at the predefined service level (mostly by nodal pressure) under varying conditions [2]. These surrogate indicators can be generally categorized into three groups: (1) resilience-based; (2) entropy-based; and (3) hybrid
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