Identifying Multi Utility Network Similarities

Abstract

Data of water infrastructure networks is often not available or of poor quality. But detailed data sets are needed to better understand the complex behavior and structure of such networks. In contrast, data for road networks is often available and of high quality. The aim of this work is to identify network similarities of infrastructure networks on a multi utility basis (i.e. identifying similarities of road, water supply and sewer networks). With the identified network similarities, the aim is to improve the quality of water distribution network data or even to automatically reconstruct missing network information out of available road network information. The results of this work are general propositions about geometrical and graph theory based similarities of road, water supply and combined sewer networks. Hence, network similarities are identified, which describe the interaction between road, water supply and sewer network in a graph theory and geometric analyses based approach. It is shown that 78% of all roads are containing 81% or 86% of a water supply or sewer network, respectively.