An Automated Tool for Smart Water Network Partitioning

Armando Nardo (), Michele Natale, Giovanni Santonastaso and Salvatore Venticinque

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2013, vol. 27, issue 13, 4493-4508

Abstract: Water Network Partitioning (WNP) represents the application of the “divide and conquer” paradigm to a Smart WAter Network (SWAN) that allows the improved application of techniques for water balance and pressure control. Indeed, these techniques can be applied with greater effectiveness by defining smaller permanent network parts, called District Meter Areas (DMAs), created by the insertion of gate valves and flow meters. The traditional criteria for the design of network DMAs are based on empirical suggestions (number of properties, length of pipes, etc.) and on approaches such as ‘trial and error’, even if used together with hydraulic simulation software. Nevertheless, these indications and procedures are very difficult to apply to large water supply systems because the insertion of gate valves modifies the original network layout and may considerably worsen the hydraulic performance of the water network. The proposed tool, based on some graph partitioning techniques, commonly applied in distributed computing, and on an original optimisation technique, allows the automatic design of a WNP comparing different possible layouts that are compliant with hydraulic performance. In this paper, the methodology was tested on a real case study using some performance indices to compare different WNPs. The proposed tool was developed in Phyton and integrates graph partitioning, hydraulic simulation techniques and a heuristic optimisation criterion. It allows the definition of DMAs with resulting performance indices that are very similar to the original network layout. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Keywords: Water network partitioning; Graph theory; Smart water network; Sectorization; Water leakage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-013-0421-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:waterr:v:27:y:2013:i:13:p:4493-4508

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-013-0421-1

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().