Identification of critical pipes using a criticality index in water distribution networks

Abstract

A water distribution network (WDN) is a critical infrastructure that must be maintained, ensuring a proper water supply to widespread customers. A WDN consists of various components, such as pipes, valves, pumps, and tanks, and these elements interact with each other to provide adequate system performance. If the elements fail due to internal or external interruptions, this may adversely impact water service to different degrees depending on the failed elements. To determine an appropriate maintenance priority, the critical elements need to be identified and mapped in the network. To identify and prioritize the critical elements (here, we focus on the pipes only) in the WDN, an element-based simulation approach is proposed, in which all the composing pipes of the WDN are reviewed one at a time. The element-based criticality is measured using several criticality indexes that are newly proposed in this study. The proposed criticality indexes are used to quantify the impacts of element failure to water service degradation. Here, four criticality indexes are developed: supply shortage (SS), economic value loss (EVL), pressure decline (PD), and water age degradation (WAD). Each of these indexes measures different aspects of the consequences, specifically social, economic, hydraulic, and water quality, respectively. The separate values of the indexes from all pipes in a network are then combined into a singular criticality value for assessment. For demonstration, the proposed approach is applied to four real WDNs to identify and prioritize the critical pipes. The proposed element-based simulation approach can be used to identify the critical components and setup maintenance scheduling of WDNs for preparedness of failure events.