Multicriteria assessment of optimal design, rehabilitation and upgrading schemes for water distribution networks

Abstract

The application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to help select the best option for the long-term design and upgrading of a water distribution network is described and applied to a real-world network. The main criteria used are: reliability-based network performance; present value of construction, upgrading, failure, and repair costs; and social and environmental issues. The AHP is a versatile and robust tool that can handle both qualitative and quantitative data, based on a simple method of pair-wise comparisons. It has been applied elsewhere on various problems, but not on the long-term design and upgrading of water distribution networks. Herein, the pipes are sized to carry maximum entropy flows using linear programming, while the best upgrading sequence is identified using dynamic programming. The upgrading options considered include pipe replacement and/or paralleling. The time-dependent deterioration of the hydraulic capacity and structural integrity are also accounted for

Water distribution network optimization using maximum entropy under multiple loading patterns

“…The pipe failure tolerance measure provides an estimate of the total demand the WDN is capable of satisfying when some components are out of service. The importance of including failure tolerance in addition to reliability for a better representation of the network performance has been demonstrated in Tanyimboh and Kalungi (2009).…”

Transitioning of Urban Water Distribution Systems

“…These include geometry (Trifunović 2012;Yazdani and Jeffrey 2010), socio economic characteristics ( Tanyimboh et al 2010;Tanyimboh and Kalungi 2009) and the level of performance of existing system.…”

“…Decision models which are the most widely researched can be classified into four main components: (i) prioritisation models that aspire to identify critical pipes and pipe cohorts for upgrade (Arulraj and Rao 1995); (ii) optimisation models ( Dandy and Engelhardt 2001;Walski et al 1987); (iii) coupled prioritisation and optimisation based models (Vairavamoorthy and Ali 2005); and (iv) multi-criteria approaches (Dandy and Engelhardt 2006;Tanyimboh and Kalungi 2009). …”

Pressure-dependent network water quality modelling

“…Several studies have been conducted to evaluate the performance of WDNs under pressure-deficient conditions. These studies have focused on hydraulic analysis and addressed issues such as hydraulic reliability and design optimisation (Germanopoulos et al, 1986;Giustolisi et al, 2008;Tanyimboh and Kalungi, 2009) without considering water quality.…”