Abstract
Optimal design of water distribution network is generally aimed to minimize the capital cost of the investments on tanks, pipes, pumps, and other appurtenances. Minimizing the cost of pipes is usually considered as a prime objective as its proportion in capital cost of the water distribution system project is very high. However, minimizing the capital cost of the pipeline alone may result in economical network configuration, but it may not be a promising solution in terms of resilience point of view. Resilience of the water distribution network has been considered as one of the popular surrogate measures to address ability of network to withstand failure scenarios. To improve the resiliency of the network, the pipe network optimization can be performed with two objectives, namely minimizing the capital cost as first objective and maximizing resilience measure of the configuration as secondary objective. In the present work, these two objectives are combined as single objective and optimization problem is solved by differential evolution technique. The paper illustrates the procedure for normalizing the objective functions having distinct metrics. Two of the existing resilience indices and power efficiency are considered for optimal design of water distribution network. The proposed normalized objective function is found to be efficient under weighted method of handling multi-objective water distribution design problem. The numerical results of the design indicate the importance of sizing pipe telescopically along shortest path of flow to have enhanced resiliency indices.
Highlights
Optimal design of water distribution network is generally aimed to minimize the capital cost of the investments on tanks, pipes, pumps, and other appurtenances
The example network is optimized for single objective function which is defined as cost per resilience index
This clearly indicates that the least cost network without consideration of resilience measures can certainly be a less resilience as its value on all three considered resilience measures is found to be less than other two solutions
Summary
Optimal design of water distribution network is generally aimed to minimize the capital cost of the investments on tanks, pipes, pumps, and other appurtenances. As far as computational point of view, water distribution system problems are classified as highly complex and it is very unlikely that simple and efficient algorithms can be developed to obtain global optimal solution when design is subjected to numerous constraints and multi-objectiveness. Ostfeld et al (2014) used genetic algorithm for the multi-objective optimization of water distribution network considering cost and resilience index as twin objectives of the design and utilized split pipe size method, which assign more than one diameter for each pipe in the network. The aim of the present work is to provide a simple way to decision makers for obtaining best solution while considering both objectives simultaneously with or without due weightage to particular objective function It brings out the way in which the resiliency of network gets increased at the expense of cost in optimal manner. Minimizing the cost and maximizing the resilience index are dealt in two different ways as a single objective optimization problem and illustrated with widely used Hanoi water distribution networks
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