A new methodology for the design of reliable water distribution networks

This paper presents a new methodology for the reliability based design of looped water distribution networks. This methodology repeatedly applies a least-cost design procedure with increasing levels of reliability obtained through more and more restrictive minimum resilience constraints while a fixed minimum pressure constraint is imposed in each node of the network. In the application to a benchmark network, comparisons with other methodologies in the literature demonstrate that the approach is able to identify, with reduced computation times, optimal cost solutions with variable level of reliability.