Steady-State Hydraulic Analysis Based on Cellular Automata Using a Parallel Paradigm

Abstract

Analysis of water distribution networks (WDNs) is considered to be indispensable for water supply design. Over the last decades, several methods have been developed to formulate and solve the steady-state hydraulic analysis of WDNs. For large WDNs, modeling the networks is complex and takes a great deal of time, and using the traditional methods becomes practically inefficient. This paper presents a parallel paradigm based on cellular automata to accelerate the hydraulic analysis of WDNs. The structure of the computing system is generated according to the structure of the WDN using the concept of cellular automata. Two methods are proposed for solving the hydraulic models. The performance of the proposed approach was compared with that of EPANET 2.0 software for networks with different complexity and topologies. The results indicate that, despite requiring more iterations to converge, the proposed parallel algorithm can accelerate the hydraulic analysis as much as 105 times using the proposed methods. WDNs analysis under steady-state conditions is used widely in applications such as network design and leak detection in WDNs. In these applications, it is necessary to solve hydraulic equations of the WDN under different scenarios to obtain the desired answer. As the size of the WDN increases, the time required to solve the equations increases accordingly. This paper presents a parallel paradigm to accelerate the hydraulic analysis of WDNs. The results indicate that the proposed parallel algorithm can accelerate the hydraulic analysis, thus reducing the network design time and determining the location of leaks in the WDN with greater speed and accuracy. Consequently, more money, time, and water can be saved. In addition, this acceleration may allow engineers to find new ways to solve their problems, or even to provide solutions to problems that in the past could not be solved with existing facilities.