• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.51 no.11
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• pp.989-998
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• 2018

Connectivity between water source and demand node can be served as a critical system performance indicator of the degree of water distribution network (WDN)' failure severity under abnormal conditions. Graph theory-based approaches have been widely applied to quantify the connectivity due to WDN's graph-like topological feature. However, most previous studies used undirected-unweighted graph theory which is not proper to WDN. In this study, the directed-weighted graph theory was applied for WDN connectivity analyses. We also proposed novel connectivity indicators, Source-to-Node Shortest Pathway (SNSP) and SNSP-Degree (SNSP-D) which is an inverse of the SNSP value, that does not require complicate hydraulic simulation of a WDN of interest. The proposed SNSP-D index was demonstrated in total 42 networks in J City, South Korea in which Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) between the proposed SNSP-D and four other system performance indicators was computed: three resilience indexes and an energy efficiency metric. It was confirmed that a system representative value of the SNSP-D has strong correlation with all resilience and energy efficiency indexes (PCC = 0.87 on average). Especially, PCC was higher than 0.93 with modified resilience index (MRI) and energy efficiency indicator. In addition, a multiple linear regression analysis was performed to identify the system hydraulic characteristic factors that affect the correlation between SNSP-D and other system performance indicators. The proposed SNSP is expected to be served as a useful surrogate measure of resilience and/or energy efficiency indexes in practice.