Given the continuous aging of pipeline infrastructure buried underground, water utilities need to make a strategic plan on how to maintain the entire water distribution systems (WDSs) to ensure the required standard of supply. This paper investigates the nexus of three key factors that have a significant impact on the decision-making process of the rehabilitation plan for WDSs. The factors considered include the problem formulations, the pipe selection methods for identifying critical components of WDSs, and the multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). The nexus was revealed by considering all the combinations of two variants for each factor. The optimal rehabilitation problem of the Exeter network was used as a case study. Results exhibit that the problem formulation determined the range of Pareto fronts essentially, which should give the highest priority in the decision-making process. The pipe selection method played a secondary role, mainly affecting the shape of Pareto fronts. Optimization algorithms also had a considerable impact on the optimality of solutions, subject to their characteristics and parameter settings. This paper also highlights that breakthroughs need to focus on these key factors to facilitate a more cost-effective solution to the rehabilitation of large WDSs.

考虑到埋在地下的管道基础设施的持续老化，自来水公司需要制定战略计划，以维护整个供水系统（WDS），以确保所需的供水标准。本文研究了对WDS康复计划的决策过程具有重要影响的三个关键因素的联系。考虑的因素包括问题表述，用于识别WDS关键组件的管道选择方法以及多目标进化算法（MOEA）。通过考虑每个因素的两个变体的所有组合来揭示联系。以埃克塞特网络的最佳康复问题为例。结果表明，问题公式基本上确定了帕累托前沿的范围，在决策过程中应该给予最高优先级。管道选择方法起次要作用，主要影响帕累托锋面的形状。优化算法还受其特性和参数设置的影响，对解决方案的最优性也有很大影响。本文还强调指出，突破需要集中在这些关键因素上，以便为大型WDS的修复提供更具成本效益的解决方案。