Partition of Water Distribution Networks into District Metered Areas Using a Graph Theoretical Approach

Abstract

We present a method for partitioning Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) into District Metered Areas (DMAs) by using a spectral graph partitioning algorithm. The effectiveness of DMA design was tested for selected edge weights and multiple numbers of established DMAs. The presented method includes a novel graph theoretic approach to determine and evaluate only relevant combinations of DMA connection. It was tested on a real-life case study for which several different solutions were generated and evaluated against their hydraulic performance. The optimal solution, i.e. design of DMAs, was selected regarding the quality of partition and the cost of WDN segmentation, since hydraulic adequacy was met for all cases where partitioning resulted in connected subgraphs.

Water Network Partitioning into District Metered Areas: A State-Of-The-Art Review

“…To measure network centrality, the eigenvector centrality [82] was used to identify the critical nodes, and edges betweenness centrality [83] were adopted to measure the important pipes, creating a high-quality cluster. Most recently, Zevnik et al [81,84] proposed spectral graph partitioning based on a generalized and normalized cut method and compared it with two known spectral methods (ratio cut and normalized cut).…”