Evaluation of the vulnerability in water distribution systems through targeted attacks

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a vulnerability analysis in different water distribution system (WDS) benchmarks, performed under a framework based on a graph model that integrates topological features and hydraulic characteristics, allowing the comparison between different attack strategies and centrality measures in terms of their ability to predict the shortage of water supply. This vulnerability framework has been previously applied to electric power systems and it employs a vulnerability prediction measure to quantify the amount of damage caused in terms of the physical damage measure. Different attack strategies and centrality measures were applied to four WDS benchmarks: the New York Tunnel, the Hanoi, the Modena, and the Balerma networks. It was determined that removing the most central element and recalculating the centrality for each stage are the most damaging attack strategy. Degree, eigenvector, and Katz centrality measures presented the best performance to predict the elements that are more relevant to the network and can cause a larger impact on the water supply. It was demonstrated that the vulnerability framework can be applied to the WDS in the same way it was previously applied to electric power systems. Future work will be oriented to the design of the WDS using optimization techniques to minimize the vulnerability of the network under faults that can be generated by droughts and other extreme weather conditions.

Assessment of the Water Distribution Networks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: A Mathematical Model

“…This kind of framework is more useful when combining topological (structural) attributes with performance measures to represent the behaviour of the grid and when they are applied to network models based on real conditions [9]. Similarly, a number of important attributes of WDSs and their relationship with vulnerability have also been studied in power systems [10] and, then, have been successfully applied to water networks [11].…”

“…On the one hand, the optimisation model has suggested new chlorine booster locations to improve water quality in the water distribution network of the city of Al-Khobar [16]. On the other hand [11], a vulnerability assessment was performed on different benchmarks to evaluate the metrics of centrality in different regions of the USA. However, these benchmarks did not include tanks, pumps, or external sources.…”

“…However, these benchmarks did not include tanks, pumps, or external sources. Motivated by the above review and discussion, we used graph modelling to develop a vulnerability framework that allows assessing the vulnerability of the network proposed in [16] by considering the missing sources of [11], i.e., tanks, pumps, or external sources. We considered both structural and operational features.…”

Fuzzy logic-based integrated performance evaluation of a water distribution network

“…Research works have been conducted to develop methods for reliability assessment for different failure types, individually, i.e., mechanical-related (Mazumder et al 2019), hydraulic-related (Giustolisi 2020), and water quality-related (Gupta et al 2012) failures. Resilience is described as the ability of a WDN to recover its functionality after a disruptive or failure event (Mazumder et al 2018;Albarakati et al 2021). Recent works evaluate networks based on resilience by considering isolation valves and segments under pipe failure conditions (Liu & Kang 2022).…”

A novel self-adaptation and sorting selection-based differential evolutionary algorithm applied to water distribution system optimization

“…Water distribution systems (WDSs) are among the most expensive urban infrastructures owing to the large capital expenditure required for system construction (Al-Khomairi et al 2020;Albarakati et al 2021;Diao 2021;Lyu et al 2021;Liu & Kang 2022). This inspires intensive studies into the optimal design of WDSs in order to minimize construction costs (Olsson 2020).…”