Testing evolutionary algorithms for optimization of water distribution networks.

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are one of the most important elements of urban infrastructure and require large investment for construction. Design of WDNs is classified as a large combinatorial discrete nonlinear optimization problem. The main concerns associated with the optimization of such networks are the nonlinearity of the discharge-head loss relationships for pipes and the discrete nature of pipe sizes. Due to these issues, this problem is widely considered to be a benchmark problem for testing and evaluating the performance of nonlinear and heuristic optimization algorithms. This paper compares different techniques, all based on evolutionary algorithms (EAs), which yield optimal solutions for least-cost design of WDNs. All of these algorithms search for the global optimum starting from populations of solutions, rather than from a single solution, as in Newton-based search methods. They use different operators to improve the performance of many solutions over repeated iterations. Ten EAs, four of them for the first time, are applied to the design of three networks and their performance in terms of the least cost, under different stopping criteria, are evaluated. Statistical information for 20 executions of the ten algorithms is summarized, and Friedman tests are conducted. Results show that, for the two-loop benchmark network, the particle swarm optimization gravitational search and biology and bioinformatics global optimization algorithms efficiently converge to the global optimum, but perform poorly for large networks. In contrast, given a sufficient number of function evaluations, the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy and soccer league competition algorithm consistently converge to the global optimum, for large networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]