Impact of isolation valves location on resilience of water distribution systems

Abstract

The isolation valves are crucial components of water distribution systems (WDS) that are used to shut down a segment of the network to repair or replace failed pipes. In this paper an algorithm to find adjacent valves to isolate a failed pipe was proposed and the global resilience analysis method was implemented to find out the critical segments based on the isolation valves. The method was applied to Net3 network with three different isolation valve configurations. The location of isolation valves changed the resilience of the WDS considerably. The critical pipes and segments were also varied with different valve configuration. More than 60 % of the most critical pipes are different between N valves and N-1 valves configurations. The resilience of Limited valves configuration (with 52 valves) was 22% and 15 % less than the resilience of N valves and N-1 valves configurations with 228 and 105 valves respectively. Furthermore, with adding valves to the critical segments, the resilience can be enhanced noticeably.