Optimisation of gravity-fed water distribution network design: A critical review

Annelies De Corte and Kenneth Sörensen

European Journal of Operational Research, 2013, vol. 228, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: This paper surveys the literature on the optimisation of water distribution network design. The water distribution network design (WDND) optimisation problem entails finding the material and diameter of each pipe in the network so that the total cost of the network is minimised without violating any hydraulic constraints. This is a difficult combinatorial optimisation problem, in which decision variables are discrete and both cost function and constraints are non-linear. Over the past 30years, a large number of methods, especially in the field of (meta) heuristics, have been developed to solve this problem, most of which obtain good results on the available benchmark networks. In addition to outlining the basic features of each method, a detailed computational comparison is presented. Based on this comparison, some issues with the current state of the art in this domain are discussed, and some future research directions are suggested. Additionally, the need for an adequate set of benchmark instances is motivated, and the minimal requirements for an instance set generator are discussed.

Keywords: Combinatorial optimisation; Water distribution network design (WDND); Metaheuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221712008983
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:228:y:2013:i:1:p:1-10

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2012.11.046

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().