Hydraulically informed graph theoretic measure of link criticality for the resilience analysis of water distribution networks

Abstract

Abstract Water Distribution Networks (WDN) are complex and highly interconnected systems. To maintain operation under failure conditions, WDNs should have built-in resilience based on topological and energy redundancy. There are various methods for analysing the resilience of WDNs based on either hydraulic models or surrogate network measures; however, not a single universally accepted method exists. Hydraulic modeling of disruptive operational scenarios suffer from combinatorial restrictions and uncertainties. Methods that rely on surrogate network measures do not take into account the complex interactions between topological and energy redundancy. To bridge this gap, the presented work introduces a hydraulically informed surrogate measure of pipe criticality for the resilience analysis of WDNs, called Water Flow Edge Betweenness Centrality (WFEBC). The WFEBC combines the random walk betweenness centrality with hydraulic (energy) loss principles in pipes. The proposed network resilience estimation method is applied to a case study network and an operational network. Furthermore, a network decomposition approach is proposed to complement the network estimation method and facilitate its scalability to large operational networks. The described resilience analysis method is benchmarked against a hydraulic model-based analysis of WDN reserve capacity. WFEBC is also applied to assess the improvement in resilience allowed by the implementation of a dynamically adaptive topology in an operational network. The benefits and limitations of the proposed method are discussed.

Keywords

• Water distribution networks
• Resilience
• Graph theory
• Random walk betweenness centrality