• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2021.06a
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• pp.147-147
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• 2021

A partition of water distribution network (WDN) into district metered areas (DMAs) brings the efficiency and efficacy for water network operation and management (O&M), especially in monitoring pressure and leakage. Traditionally, the DMA configurations (i.e., number, shape, and size of DMAs) are permanent and cannot be changed occasionally. This leads to changes in water quality and reduced network redundancy lowering network resilience against abnormal conditions such as water demand variability and mechanical failures. This study proposes a framework to automatically divide a WDN into dynamic DMA configurations, in which the DMA layouts can self-adapt in response to abnormal scenarios. To that aim, a complex graph theory is adopted to sectorize a WDN into multiscale DMA layouts. Then, different failure-based scenarios are investigated on the existing DMA layouts. Here, an optimization-based model is proposed to convert existing DMA layouts into dynamic layouts by considering existing valves and possibly placing new valves. The objective is to minimize the alteration of flow paths (i.e., flow direction and velocity in the pipes) while preserving the hydraulic performance of the network. The proposed method is tested on a real complex WDN for demonstration and validation of the approach.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2020.06a
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• pp.115-115
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• 2020

Water network partitioning (WNP) is an initiative technique to divide the original water distribution network (WDN) into several sub-networks with only sparse connections between them called, District Metered Areas (DMAs). Operating and managing (O&M) WDN through DMAs is bringing many advantages, such as quantification and detection of water leakage, uniform pressure management, isolation from chemical contamination. The research of WNP recently has been highlighted by applying different methods for dividing a network into a specified number of DMAs. However, it is an open question on how to determine the optimal number of DMAs for a given network. In this study, we present a method to divide an original WDN into DMAs (called Clustering) based on community structure algorithm for auto-creation of suitable DMAs. To that aim, many hydraulic properties are taken into consideration to form the appropriate DMAs, in which each DMA is controlled as uniform as possible in terms of pressure, elevation, and water demand. In a second phase, called Sectorization, the flow meters and control valves are optimally placed to divide the DMAs, while minimizing the pressure reduction. To comprehensively evaluate the WNP performance and determine optimal number of DMAs for given WDN, we apply the framework of multiple-criteria decision analysis. The proposed method is demonstrated using a real-life benchmark network and obtained permissible results. The approach is a decision-support scheme for water utilities to make optimal decisions when designing the DMAs of their WDNs.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2019.05a
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• pp.162-162
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• 2019

Water Distribution Network (WDN) is a critical infrastructure to be maintained ensuring proper water supply to wide-spread consumers. The WDN consists of pipes, valves, pumps and tanks, and these elements interact each other to provide adequate system performance. If elements fail by internal or external interruptions, it may result in adverse impact to water service with different degree depending on the failed element. To determine an appropriate maintenance priority, the critical elements need to be identified and mapped in the network. In order to identify and prioritize the critical elements in WDN, an element-based simulation approach is proposed, in which all the elements composing the WDN are reviewed one at a time. The element-based criticality is measured using several resilience indexes that are newly developed in this study. The proposed resilience indexes are used to quantify the impacts of element failure to water service degradation. Here, three resilience indexes are developed, such as User Demand Severity, Economic Value Loss and Water Age Degradation, each of which intends to measure different aspects of consequences, such as social, economic, and water quality, respectively. For demonstration, the proposed approach is applied to a benchmark water network to identify and prioritize the critical elements.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.48 no.10
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• pp.845-855
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• 2015

Studies of optimizing pump operation in water distribution networks (WDN) are receiving spotlight in recent days. However, the water networks are quite complex including thousands of or even tens of thousands of nodes and pipes, thus simulation time is an issue. In some cases, implementing a computer model for pump operation decisions is restrictive due to intensive computation time. To that end, it is necessary to reduce the simulation time of water networks by simplifying the network layout. In this study, WDN skeletonization approaches were suggested and applied to a real water transmission network in South Korea. In skeletonizing the original network, it was constrained to match the water pressure and water age in the same junction locations to maintain the hydraulic and water quality characteristics in the skeletonized network. Using the skeletonization approaches suggested in this study, it is expected to reduce the simulation time of WDN and apply for developing a computer module of WDN real-time optimal operation.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2021.06a
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• pp.146-146
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• 2021

A contamination event occurring in water distribution networks (WDNs) needs to be handled with the appropriate mitigation strategy to protect public health safety and ensure water supply service continuation. Typically the mitigation phase consists of contaminant sensing, public warning, network inspection, and recovery. After the contaminant source has been detected and treated, contaminants still exist in the network, and the contaminated water should be flushed out. The recovery period is critical to remove any lingering contaminant in a rapid and non-detrimental manner. The contaminant flushing can be done in several ways. Conventionally, the opening of hydrants is applied to drain the contaminant out of the system. Relying on advanced information and communication technology (ICT) on WDN management, warning and information can be distributed fast through electronic media. Water utilities can inform their customers to participate in the contaminant flushing by opening and closing their house faucets to drain the contaminated water. The household draining strategy consists of determining sectors and timeslots of the WDN users based on hydraulic simulation. The number of sectors should be controlled to maintain sufficient pressure for faucet draining. The draining timeslot is determined through hydraulic simulation to identify the draining time required for each sector. The effectiveness of the strategy is evaluated using three measurements, such as Wasted Water (WW), Flushing Duration (FD), and Pipe Erosion (PE). The optimal draining strategy (i.e., group and timeslot allocation) in the WDN can be determined by minimizing the measures.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.21-32
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• 1997

Optimum design of water distribution network(WDN) in many times means just reducing redundancy. Given only a few situations are taken into consideration for such design, WDN deprived of inherited redundancy may not work properly in some unconsidered cases. Quantifying redundancy and incorporating it into the optimal design process will be a way of overcoming just reduction of redundancy. Expected shortage is developed as a reliability surrogate in WDN. It is an indicator of the frequency, duration and severity of failure. Using this surrogate, Expected Shortage Optimization Model (ESOM) is developed. ESOM is tested with an example network and results are analyzed and compared with those from other reliability models. The analysis results indicate that expected shortage is a quantitative surrogate measure, especially, good in comparing different designs and obtaining tradeoff between cost and. reliability. In addition, compared other models, ESOM is also proved useful in optimizing WDN with reliability and powerful in controlling reliability directly in the optimization process, even if computational burden is high. Future studies are suggested which focus on how to increase applicability and flexibility of ESOM.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.719-728
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• 2019

Valve in water distribution network (WDN), that controls the flow in pipes, is used to isolate a segment (a part of WDN) under abnormal water supply conditions (e.g., pipe breakage, water quality failure event). The segment isolation degrades pressure and water serviceability in neighboring area during the water service outage of the segment. Recent hydraulic and water quality failure events reported encouraging WDN valve installation based on various abnormal water supply scenarios. This study introduces a scenario-based optimal valve installation approach to optimize the number of valves, the amount of undelivered water, and a shortest water supply path indicator (i.e., Hydraulic Geodesic Index). The proposed approach is demonstrated in the valve installation of Pescara network, and the optimal valve sets are obtained under multiple scenarios and compared to the existing valve set. Pressure-driven analysis (PDA) scheme is used for a network hydraulic simulation. The optimal valve set derived from the proposed method has 19 fewer valves than the existing valve set in the network and the amount of undelivered water was also lower for the optimal valve set. Reducing the reservoir head requires a greater number of valves to achieve the similar functionality of the WDN with the optimal valve set of the original reservoir head. This study also compared the results of demand-driven analysis (DDA) and the PDA and confirmed that the latter is required for optimal valve installation.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.52 no.4
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• pp.291-300
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• 2019

If pipes are damaged in a water distribution network (WDN), adjacent valves are closed to isolate the pipes for repair. Due to the closed valves, parts of WDN are isolated from water supply sources. The isolated area is divided into Intended Isolation Area (IIA) and Unintended Isolation Area (UIA). The IIA occurs by intention to isolate the damaged pipe, while UIA is unintentionally disconnected from the sources due to IIA. Thus, the extension of isolated area and suspended flows are mainly affected by number and location of installed valves in WDN. In this study, optimization models were developed to determine optimal valve locations in WDN. In a single-objective model, total water supply suspension is minimized, while a multi-objective model intends to simultaneously minimize the suspended flow and valve installation cost. Optimal valve placement results obtained from both models were compared and analyzed using a sample application network.

• 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.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.70-80
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• 1998

Many algorithms to find a minimum cost design of water distribution network (WDN) have been developed during the last decades. Most of them have tried to optimize cost only while satisfying other constraining conditions. For this, a certain degree of simplification is required in their calculation process which inevitably limits the real application of the algorithms, especially, to large networks. In this paper, an optimum design method using the Genetic Algorithms (GA) is developed which is designed to increase the applicability, especially for the real world large WDN. The increased to applicability is due to the inherent characteristics of GA consisting of selection, reproduction, crossover and mutation. Just for illustration, the GA method is applied to find an optimal solution of the New York City water supply tunnel. For the calculation, the parameter of population size and generation number is fixed to 100 and the probability of crossover is 0.7, the probability of mutation is 0.01. The yielded optimal design is found to be superior to the least cost design obtained from the Linear Program method by $4.276 million.