Abstract

Drinking water distribution networks (WDNs) are a crucial infrastructure for life in cities. Deterioration of this ageing, and partly hidden from view, infrastructure can result in losses due to leakage and an increased contamination risk. To counteract this, maintenance strategies are required to maintain the service level. Information on the most critical elements of a WDN, with respect to the functioning of the system as a whole, is essential for prioritising maintenance or rehabilitation activities. In this study a Graph theory based method is developed and applied for efficiently identifying the most critical elements. The main advantage of this method is that it avoids the need to perform elaborate hydrodynamic model calculations. Instead, the structure of the network is the main starting point. The results show that the structure of the network is more decisive than the hydraulics with respect to the criticality of the system’s performance as a whole. Results depict that the suggested approach is applicable not only to the main (primary) network, but also to the capillaries which are normally beyond the scope of the traditional methods applied so-far because of the complexity of the networks and the required calculation time.

摘要

饮用水分配网络（WDN）是城市生活的重要基础设施。这种老化的恶化以及部分看不见的基础设施会由于泄漏而造成损失，并增加污染的风险。为了解决这个问题，需要维护策略来维持服务水平。关于WDN最关键要素的信息，与整个系统的功能有关，对于优先安排维护或修复活动至关重要。在这项研究中，开发了一种基于图论的方法并将其应用于有效地识别最关键的元素。这种方法的主要优点是它避免了执行复杂的流体力学模型计算的需要。相反，网络的结构是主要出发点。结果表明，就系统整体性能的重要性而言，网络的结构比液压系统更具决定性。结果表明，由于网络的复杂性和所需的计算时间，建议的方法不仅适用于主（主）网络，而且还适用于毛细管，这些毛细管通常超出了迄今为止所应用的传统方法的范围。