Water consumption is perhaps the main process governing Water Distribution Systems. Due to its uncertain nature, water consumption should be modeled as a stochastic process or characterized using statistical tools. This paper presents a description of water consumption using statistics as mean, variance, and correlation. The analytical equations expressing the dependency of these statistics on the number of served users, the observation time and the sampling rate, namely the scaling laws, are theoretically derived and discussed. Real residential water consumption data are used to assess the validity of these theoretical scaling laws. Results show a good agreement between the scaling laws and the scaling behavior of real data statistics. The scaling laws represent an innovative and powerful tool, allowing to infer the statistical features of overall water

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This paper presents a practical application of a sensitivity matrix-based methodology for determining optimal pressure sensor locations for leak detection in a water distribution network (WDN). The optimization is formulated as multi-objective, exploring the tradeoff between the minimization of the number of sensors to be installed and the maximization of the detection coverage. The methodology is applied to a real-life WDN serving the area of Seppe in the Netherlands. Close collaboration with the water utility enabled us to explore alternative designs, fine-tune the optimization problem and obtain results that are ready for practical implementation.

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Abstract. Genetic algorithms can be a powerful tool for the automated design of optimal drinking water distribution networks. Fast convergence of such algorithms is a crucial factor for successful practical implementation at the drinking water utility level. In this technical note, we therefore investigate the performance of a suite of genetic variators that was tailored to the optimization of a least-cost network design. Different combinations of the variators are tested in terms of convergence rate and the robustness of the results during optimization of the real-world drinking water distribution network of Sittard, the Netherlands. The variator configurations that reproducibly reach the furthest convergence after 105 function evaluations are reported. In the future these may aid in dealing with the computational challenges of optimizing real-world networks.