A New Procedure for Optimal Design of District Metered Areas Based on the Multilevel Balancing and Refinement Algorithm

A procedure for optimal design of District Metered Areas (DMAs) within a water distribution network based on a multilevel balancing and refinement algorithm to partition the network and determine the optimal meter positions, coupled with a pressure driven hydraulic simulator to quantify the hydraulic performance of the districtualized system, is presented. Unlike other procedures based on graph partitioning techniques proposed in the scientific literature, the two main issues involved in the design of the DMAs, namely a) how to partition the nodes into the required number of districts, and b) which pipes linking districts to leave open, and fitted with an assigned number of flow meters, and which to close, are simultaneously resolved. The application of this procedure to a real case shows that this approach provides design solutions well adapted to different numbers of measuring points, yielding superior performance indicator values to similar procedures reported in the literature and used here for comparative purposes.