Uncertainty Analysis of Transient Flow in Water Distribution Networks

Abstract

For transient analysis of a pipe network, the unsteady flow governing equations should be solved to obtain the extreme pressure heads in the system, which may be faced with several uncertainties. To evaluate that to what extent the input uncertainties can affect the system responses, a simulation model based on the fuzzy sets theory is introduced. For this purpose, triangular fuzzy numbers are used to represent the input uncertainties. Then, to obtain the extreme pressure heads in each location of the network and at each level of uncertainty, four independent optimization problems are solved. In these problems, the nodal maximum and minimum pressure heads are the objective functions and the simulation parameters are the decision variables. Accordingly, for fuzzy analysis of a pipe network, a complicated many-objective optimization problem arises. To solve the problem efficiently a many-objective genetic algorithm is coupled to the transient simulation model. To speed up the analysis, a transient simulation model in the frequency domain is used. The proposed model is applied to a pipe network and the results are discussed. The model is found computationally fast and promising for real applications.