Abstract
Protection of the water system is paramount due to the negative consequences of contaminated water on the public health. Water resources are one of the critical infrastructures that must be preserved from deliberate and accidental attacks. Water qualities are examined at the treatment plant. However, its quality can substantially be contaminated during transportation from the plant to the consumers’ taps. Contamination in water distribution networks (WDNs) is a danger that can have severe consequences on public health as well as an economic and social instability. Water distribution networks are immensely susceptible to deliberate or accidental attacks due to the complex nature of the system. Hence, contamination source identification (CSI) is a topical issue in water distribution systems that require immediate attention of researchers in order to protect mankind from the adverse effect of consuming contaminated water. Usually, a contaminant event can be detected by the water quality monitoring sensors or the contaminant warning system (CWS) installed on the network. Nevertheless, how to derive the source of the contamination from the collected information is a difficult task that must be tackled in order to evaluate the spread of the contamination and for immediate remedial strategies. In the past two decades, considerable efforts and advancement have been made by researchers applying various techniques in order to locate the source of the contamination in WDNs. Each of the techniques has certain limitations and applicability as reported in the literature. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the existing techniques with emphasis on their importance and technical challenges. Despite a series of investigations in this domain, the field is yet to be unified. Hence, open research areas are still available to explore. Consequently, improvement on the existing techniques is necessary and hereby suggested. More importantly, practical application of these techniques offer a major research gap that must be addressed.
Highlights
One of the most important environmental challenges in the 21st century is the protection of a water distribution network that supplies clean water to consumers around the globe
A computational approach based on decision trees for selecting a series of junctions in the water distribution networks (WDNs) to conduct an extended evaluation of the effect of water contamination and isolating the source area with a few quality samples was described by Eliades and Polycarpou [167]
It is evident that the existing approaches were able to identify the contamination source to a reasonable extent
Summary
One of the most important environmental challenges in the 21st century is the protection of a water distribution network that supplies clean water to consumers around the globe. A comprehensive review of the existing approaches for the contamination source identification in the water distribution network is presented. The CSI problem entails adequate computation of three major parameters These are: the contamination source location, the concentration of the contaminant (mass history) and the time of intrusion. This information can be computed from the data collected by the monitoring sensors installed on the networks. Hu et al [39] reported that the contamination source identification problem is primarily handled as an inverse problem where unknown input parameters can be obtained from partially known output This problem has received reasonable attention from researchers considering its significant and negative consequences on the society. Nodes 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are pipe junctions, respectively
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