Network Design through the Phasing of Construction Approach

This paper presents a new approach for design of water distribution mains aimed at considering the phasing of construction. It makes it possible to identify, on prefixed time steps or intervals (for instance 25 years), the upgrade of the construction rendering the network able to satisfy, during the expected life of the system, growing nodal demands related to the increment in the population served. An optimization methodology was set-up and applied to a simple case-study, where two different scenarios were considered concerning the growth of the network. Results showed that this approach is able to yield better results when compared with the single flow design, because it enables short term construction upgrades to be performed while keeping a vision of the expected long term network growth