Partitioning of Water Distribution Network into District Metered Areas Using Existing Valves.

Water distribution network (WDN) leakage management has received increased attention in recent years. One of the most successful leakage-control strategies is to divide the network into District Metered Areas (DMAs). As a multi-staged technique, the generation of DMAs is a difficult task in design and implementation (i.e., clustering, sectorization, and performance evaluation). Previous studies on DMAs implementation did not consider the potential use of existing valves in achieving the objective. In this work, a methodology is proposed for detecting clusters and reducing the cost of additional valves and DMA sectorization by considering existing valves as much as possible. The procedure of DMAs identification has been divided into three stages, i.e., a) clusters identification; b) sectorization or boundaries optimization and c) performance evaluation of the partitioned network. The proposed methodology is evaluated on a simple network and a real-world water network with the findings provided and compared to the DMAs, established for a raw water network with no existing valves. It is found that there is an adequate difference in cost of strategy implementation in both the cases for the network under consideration and the existing valve system achieved better network performance in terms of resilience index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]