Water Supply Network Partitioning Based on Simultaneous Cost and Energy Optimization

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) improves water network management, simplifying the computation of water budgets and, consequently, allowing the identification and reduction of water loss. It is achieved by inserting flow meters and gate valves in the network, previously clustered in subsystems. The clustering and partitioning phases are carried out with different procedures. The first one requires clustering algorithms that assign network nodes to each district (or cluster). The second one chooses the boundary pipes where flow meters or gate valves are to be inserted. In this paper, SWANP software is employed to achieve a network clustering through two different algorithms based on a multilevel-recursive bisection and community-structure procedures. After that, a novel multi-objective function is introduced and applied to a large Mexican network integrating both cost and energy performance, thus providing a smart Decision Support System (DSS) based on qualitative and quantitative measures, and diagrams for evaluating the optimal layout in terms of the number of districts, cost, and hydraulic performance

Optimal Design Of Network Partitioning For Water Distribution System Protection From Intentional Contamination

The intentional contamination of water distribution systems represents one of the major risks for citizens, consequently after 11th September 2001 many international organizations have been concerned about it. The availability at low cost of new monitoring and management devices, controlled by a remote system, allows to define different layouts of the water network in a new paradigm of dynamic layouts of water distribution systems in which an important role is played by water network partitioning and sectorization. Recently the advantages of these techniques have been investigated to analyse their application to the problem of water network protection from the contamination. The possibility of designing districts and sectors reduces the risk of affecting many people because several points of contaminant introduction would be needed to produce a wide negative impact on the network. Furthermore, the closure of the sectors, in which the contamination occurs, allows to protect significantly a part of the users. This way the water network partitioning respects the criteria of dual-use value because districts and sectors, in addition to protect the network from contamination, are essentially defined for other aims (water balance, pressure management, etc.) optimizing the costs. The design of the water network partitioning is essentially based only on the reduction of the negative effects on hydraulic performance due to the insertion of gate valves in the network, but not on the minimization of the negative effects of a possible contamination. In this study a novel methodology is proposed that allows to optimize the design of water network partitioning both for compliance of hydraulic performance and for water protection. The methodology is based on heuristic optimization techniques that optimize a costrained multiobjective fuction. The analysis was carried out with different contaminant and sectorization scenarios on a real multiple source water distribution network in Mexico

Flujo Estocástico y Transporte en Redes de Distribución de Agua Potable

Flujo Estocástico y Transporte en Redes de Distribución de Agua Potabl

The Use of TRMM 3B42 Product for Drought Monitoring in Mexico

Drought has been a recurrent phenomenon in Mexico. For its assessment and monitoring, several studies have monitored meteorological droughts using standardized indices of precipitation deficits. Such conventional studies have mostly relied on rain gauge-based measurements, with the main limitation being the scarcity of rain gauge spatial coverage. This issue does not allow a robust spatial characterization of drought. A recent alternative for monitoring purposes can be found in satellite-based remote sensing of meteorological variables. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the standardized precipitation index (SPI) in Mexico during the period 1998 to 2013, using the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite product 3B42. Results suggest that Mexico experienced the driest conditions during the great drought between 2011 and 2012; however, temporal variability in the SPI was found across different climatic regions. Nevertheless, a comparison of the SPI derived by TRMM against the rain gauge-based SPI computed by the official Mexican Drought Monitor showed low to medium correlation of the time series though both SPIs managed to capture the most relevant droughts at the national scale. We conclude that the TRMM product can properly monitor meteorological droughts despite its relative short dataset length (~15 years). Finally, we recommend an assimilation of rain gauge and satellite-based precipitation data to provide more robust estimates of meteorological drought severity