Optimal Pressure Measurement Layout Design in Water Distribution Network Systems

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of locating the optimal pressure measurement points in a hydraulic system to help system management, calibration/validation of hydraulic models and measurement planning. Two approaches are discussed in the present work. The first method splits the hydraulic system by means of community concept borrowed from graph theory and uses merely the topology of the network. The resulting subsystems will have minimum number of external and maximum number of internal connections and leaves the choice of locating the single pressure measurement location per subsystem to a higher-level decision. The second technique is based on the sensitivity analysis of the hydraulic network and places the measurement points at the most sensitive locations, while trying to preserve the spatial diversity of the layout, i.e. preventing the accumulation of the measurement points within a small area of high sensitivity. The performance of both techniques is demonstrated on real-size hydraulic networks. The proposed sampling layouts are compared to classic D-optimality, A-optimality and V-optimality criterion.