Resilience evaluation for water distribution system based on partial nodes' hydraulic information

Abstract

Accurate resilience evaluation for water distribution systems generally requires all nodes' hydraulic data which are usually obtained from a well-calibrated hydraulic model. However, in reality, few utilities maintain a workable hydraulic model, making the resilience evaluation far more from practicability. Under this condition, whether resilience evaluation can be realized based on a small amount of monitoring nodes is still a research gap. Therefore, this paper investigates the possibility of accurate resilience evaluation using partial nodes by answering two problems: (1) whether the importance of nodes differs in resilience evaluation; (2) what proportion of nodes are indispensable in resilience evaluation. Accordingly, the Gini index of nodes' importance and the error distribution of partial node resilience evaluation are computed and analyzed. A database including 192 networks is used. Results show that the importance of nodes in the resilience evaluation varies. The Gini index of nodes' importance is 0.604 ± 0.106. The proportion of nodes that meet the accuracy requirement of resilience evaluation is 6.5% ± 2%. Further analysis shows that the importance of nodes is determined by the transmission efficiency between water sources and consumption nodes, and the degree of a node's influence on other nodes. The optimal proportion of required nodes is controlled by a network's centralization, centrality, and efficiency. These results show that accurate resilience evaluation using partial nodes' hydraulic data is feasible and provide some basis for the resilience evaluation-orientated selection of monitoring nodes.

Keywords: Correlation; Network-level attribute; Node importance; Node-level attribute; Resilience.