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Abstract: Municipal water distribution systems may consist of thousands to tens of thousands of hydraulic components such as pipelines, valves, tanks, hydrants, and pumping units. With the capabilities of today’s computers and database management software, “all pipe” hydraulic simulation models can be easily constructed. However, the uncertainty and complexity of water distribution systems interrelationships makes it difficult to predict its performances under various conditions such as failure scenarios, detection of sources of contamination intrusions, sensor placement locations, etc. A possible way to cope with these difficulties is to gain insight in to the system behavior by simplifying its operation through topological/connectivity analysis. In this study a tool of this kind based on graph theory is developed and demonstrated. The algorithm divides the system into clusters according to the flow directions in pipes. The resulted clustering is generic and can be utilized for different purposes such as water security enhancements by sensor placements at clusters, or efficient isolation of a contaminant intrusion. The methodology is demonstrated on a benchmark water distribution system from the research literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Leak and backflow detections are essential aspects of Water Distribution Systems (WDSs) monitoring and are commonly fulfilled using approaches that are based on static sensor networks and point measurements. Alternatively, we propose a mobile, wireless sensor network solution composed of mobile sensor nodes that travel freely inside the pipes with the water flow, collect and transmit measurements in near-realtime (called sensors) and static access points (called beacons). This study complements the tremendous progress in mobile sensor technology. We formulate the sensor and beacon optimal placement task as a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem to maximize localization accuracy with budget constraint. Given the high time complexity of MINLP formulation, we propose a disjoint scheme that follows the strategy of splitting the sensor and beacon placement problems and determining the respective number of sensors and beacons by exhaustive search in linear time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]