Development of operational resilience metrics for water distribution systems

Abstract

Water distribution networks (WDNs) play an important role in accommodating the water supply needs of the community. WDNs are categorized as critical infrastructure as they affect the nation’s economy, security and social well-being. Thus, it becomes essential to protect them from any kinds of failure. WDNs encounter significant failures due to natural and/or man-made disasters. These include earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, hazardous material released by industries, terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks and ageing infrastructures. Given this wide variety of possible threats, it is important to design resilient WDNs; WDNs that can recover faster from failures and maintain water distribution with minimal losses. In this work, a two-step approach is developed to analyse the resilience of WDNs. It involves collecting adequate information about the network parameters (using pressure and flow sensors) and utilizing it to calculate two performance metrics. These metrics determine the state of nodes in the network and help identify disruptions. The applicability of the proposed methodology in identifying various disruptions is demonstrated on various large-scale public water networks available in the literature. This method can also be extended for continuous monitoring and controlling of large-scale water distribution systems.