Reliability analysis of water distribution systems under uncertainty

Abstract

In most of the developing countries, the Water Distribution Networks (WDN) are of intermittent type because of the shortage of safe drinking water. Failure of a pipeline(s) in such cases will cause not only the fall in one or more nodal heads but also the poor connectivity of source with various demand nodes of the system. Most of the previous works have used the two-step algorithm based on pathset or cutset approach for connectivity analysis. The computations become more cumbersome when connectivity of all demand nodes taken together with that of supply is carried out. In the present paper, network connectivity based on the concept of Appended Spanning Tree (AST) is suggested to compute global network connectivity which is defined as the probability of the source node being connected with all the demand nodes simultaneously. The concept of AST has distinct advantages as it attacks the problem directly rather than in an indirect way as most of the studies so far have done. Since the water distribution system is a repairable one, a general expression for pipeline avialability using the failure/repair rate is considered. Furthermore, the sensitivity of global reliability estimates due to the likely error in the estimation of failure/repair rates of various pipelines is also studied.