Water Distribution Network Reliability: Stochastic Simulation

Abstract

Stochastic simulation is applied in a reliability analysis of a regional water distribution network. To complement the connectivity-based reliability analysis presented in the companion paper, the proposed stochastic simulation is aimed at evaluating the impacts of component failures on meeting demand at a certain quantity level. Simulation is conducted in a manner such that a sampling experiment of the system performance is repeated a sufficient number of times and the results are analyzed to obtain the desired reliability index. Given the mean time to failure and repair time of links, a large number of synthetic system conditions are generated and operations of system under the different conditions are simulated. Stochastic simulation of the system is conducted with a highly efficient embedded generalized network flow model (EMNET) to determine the optimal system operations for each scenario. The proposed reliability analysis method is applied to the water distribution network of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWDSC).