• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.293-303
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• 2015

Optimal design of the water supply pipe network aims to minimize construction cost while satisfying the required hydraulic constraints such as the minimum and maximum pressures, and velocity. Since considering one single design factor (i.e., cost) is very vulnerable for including future conditions and cannot satisfy operator's needs, various design factors should be considered. Hence, this study presents three kinds of design factors (i.e., minimizing construction cost, maximizing reliability, and surplus head) to perform multi-objective optimization design. Harmony Search (HS) Algorithm is used as an optimization technique. As well-known benchmark networks, Hanoi network and Gyeonggi-do P city real world network are used to verify the applicability of the proposed model. In addition, the proposed multi-objective model is also applied to a real water distribution networks and the optimization results were statistically analyzed. The results of the optimal design for the benchmark and real networks indicated much better performance compared to those of existing designs and the other approach (i.e., Genetic Algorithm) in terms of cost and reliability, cost, and surplus head. As a result, this study is expected to contribute for the efficient design of water distribution networks.