Optimal Pressure Management for Large-Scale Water Distribution Systems Using Smoothing Model

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Optimal pressure management in water distribution systems (WDSs) is one of the most efficient approaches to control water leakage for water utilities worldwide. The optimal pressure management can be accomplished through regulating operations of pressure reducing valves (PRVs) to ensure that the excessive pressure in the WDS is minimized. This engineering task can be casted into a nonlinear program problem (NLP) with non-smooth constraints. Until now, the non-smooth constraints have been approximated by the smoothing function of Chen Harker-Kanzow-Smale (CHKS). In this paper, instead of using the CHKS function, we propose to apply the uniform smoothing function for formulation of the NLP. Numerical simulations using two smoothing functions will be carried out for optimal pressure managements of a benchmark WDS and a real-world WDS in Thainguyen City, in Vietnam. The comparison results reveal that the NLP formulated with the uniform smoothing function outperforms the existing NLP formulated with the CHKS in terms of optimal solution accuracy.