Water distribution systems enable social and economic development and sustain people quality of life. However, these systems face significant performance challenges including ageing, natural disruptive events, and man-made disruptions. Physical protection of networked infrastructure distributed over large geographical areas is unfeasible. A cost-effective alternative is to enhance the water distribution system resilience: ensuring reduced system damage in case of disruption, and enhancing system capacity to recover lost performance within acceptable time and cost limits. This paper presents a novel network-based methodology to evaluate resilience of water distribution systems. This methodology utilises stochastic simulation on a network model to generate statistical data on the resilience probability of the actual water infrastructure system. The methodology is a management decision support tool for enhancing system preparedness, enabling acceptable recovery parameters, and improving the evaluation of capital investment alternatives. The network-based approach can be extended to complex networks integrating physical and non-physical assets.
Read full abstract