Abstract
In the last years, the scientific literature has reported an increasing use of hydraulic models to describe water distribution systems (WDS). Hydraulic models represent tools for managing the complexity of WDSs, and a number of optimization methods have been proposed to improve the performance of these infrastructures. However, because of the lack of available data on WDSs many works have only considered synthetic WDS with idealized behaviour or small-sized WDSs with simple topology and limited complexity. This lack of complex case studies has often hindered the demonstration of the potential of hydraulic models and of the optimization approaches relying on their use. In this work, we present a case study about a real large WDS. The system is composed of approximately 3000 pipes (>170km) and 3000 demand nodes (corresponding to 50,000 users) that are spread across a hilly area over a 200 m elevation gradient. Water is provided by ten wells and it is distributed by five pumping stations and four tanks at different elevations. Pump operation is partly automatically controlled by water levels in tanks and partly by a fixed temporal schedule. This complexity results in a nontrivial hydraulic behaviour that is well reproduced by our hydraulic model. The model is also used with a multi-objective genetic algorithm solver to identify different operational scenarios that lead to a reduction of energy consumption and water leakages.
Highlights
The growing urbanization, the development of new technologies, the increased awareness of users, and the needs dictated by environmental sustainability require water distribution networks (WDNs) to be increasingly efficient
This work has considered as case study a real WDN of a medium-sized town with 50,000 inhabitants and water demands from both residential and industrial users
The need for multiple pumping stations results in a considerable energy consumption, but the structural and operational complexity of the WDN results hampers the identification of effective actions to reduce the amount of required energy for pump operation
Summary
The growing urbanization, the development of new technologies, the increased awareness of users, and the needs dictated by environmental sustainability require water distribution networks (WDNs) to be increasingly efficient These purposes stimulate the scientific community to propose novel approaches able to face new problems by employing quantitative predictive tools [e.g., 1,2,3,4]. In this picture, a typical problem occurring in advanced societies is the existence of a huge number of old WDNs that have not been upgraded and are managed following heuristic rules, which often correspond to conditions that have partially become outdated [5].
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