Presenting a Simple Approach to Pressure and Leakage Management in Real Water Distribution Networks by Optimal Operational Scheduling of Valves

Pressure management is an efficient and inexpensive way to reduce leakage in water distribution networks, which is usually possible by systematical operation of valves, pumps, reservoirs, and tanks. In water distribution networks, there are many valves only used during the repairs in the time of accidents. In this paper, a simple approach is proposed for managing pressure and leakage in networks with optimal scheduling of the existing valves’ operation. For this purpose, the optimal locations of the valves are determined by using the valve selection index and their opening rate has been optimized in the minimum, medium and maximum consumption conditions. The optimization was done by combining particle swarm and ant colony optimization algorithm and EPANET simulator within the framework of MATLAB. The proposed method is performed both on a sample and the real network. The results show that there is a significant improvement in the performance of both networks in the average and maximum consumption conditions, so that, the reliability of the Maragheh city network is improved by 22 and 24 percent and leakage by 31 and 20 percent, respectively, compared to the base model. In general, using this approach can improve the performance of real networks by manual programming of a number of selected valves.