Minimizing the Consequences of Intentional Attack on Water Infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract: Since September 11, 2001, protecting the na-tion’s water infrastructure and improving water networkresiliency have become priorities in the water industry.In this work, we develop methods to mitigate the con-sequences of water shortage resulting from destructionof facilities in water networks. These methods integratesearch techniques, such as branch-and-bound and geneticalgorithms, with a hydraulic solver to check demand fea-sibilities across a residual water network. The objective isto identify a feasible customer demand pattern that min-imizes the consequences of water shortage in the down-graded network. We present a mathematical model of theproblem addressed along with an exact solution method-ology and several heuristics. We apply these methodolo-gies to three water networks ranging in size from approx-imately 10–700 nodes and compare the solution qualityand computational efficiency. ∗ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: malawley@ecn.purdue.edu . 1 INTRODUCTION