title: Flexible Reconfiguration of Existing Urban Water Infrastructure Systems.
abstract: This paper presents a practical methodology for the flexible reconfiguration of existing water distribution infrastructure, which is adaptive to the water utility constraints and facilitates in operational management for pressure and water loss control. The network topology is reconfigured into a star-like topology, where the center node is a connected subset of transmission mains, that provides connection to water sources, and the nodes are the subsystems that are connected to the sources through the center node. In the proposed approach, the system is first decomposed into the main and subsystems based on graph theory methods and then the network reconfiguration problem is approximated as a single-objective linear programming problem, which is efficiently solved using a standard solver. The performance and resiliency of the original and reconfigured systems are evaluated through direct and surrogate measures. The methodology is demonstrated using two large-scale water distribution systems, showing the flexibility of the proposed approach. The results highlight the benefits and disadvantages of network decentralization.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States.
authors.forename: Lina Sela
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Perelman
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University , Coventry CV1 2JH, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Allen
authors.affiliation: Visenti Private Limited , Singapore 608576, Singapore.
authors.forename: Ami
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Preis
authors.affiliation: Visenti Private Limited , Singapore 608576, Singapore.
authors.forename: Mudasser
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Iqbal
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Whittle
mesh_terms: D002947:Cities; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D014881:Water Supply / Q000379:methods