Use of metamodels in real-time operation of water distribution systems

Published16th Water Distribution System Analysis Conference, WDSA2014 — Urban Water Hydroinformatics and Strategic PlanningThis paper presents a methodology for real-time pump scheduling in water distribution system. The methodology uses an optimizer linked to other two modules: one to predict the hydraulic behavior of the system and another to forecast the demands. A metamodel is used instead of a traditional hydraulic simulator to speed up relevant computations, i.e. evaluations of large number of candidate pump schedules generated during the optimization process. The methodology presented is applied to a real-life water distribution system in Brazil. The results obtained show that the use of metamodel can generate low cost pump schedules in a computationally fast manner.The authors acknowledge the support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education (CAPES) and from the Brazilian Scientific and Technological Development Council (CNPq) for providing the PhD's scholarship and Grant to the second author, and also from the Araraquara’s Autonomous Department of Water and Sewage (DAAE-Araraquara, SP, Brazil) for providing data and assistance through the agreement between the company and the University of São Paulo