A parallel computing architecture based on cellular automata for hydraulic analysis of water distribution networks.

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are one of the largest infrastructures in society. Various methods for formulation and hydraulic analysis of water distribution networks, including numerical and non-numerical methods, have been previously proposed. Due to the complexity, the nonlinearity of the hydraulic equations of water distribution networks, and the need for multiple executions and uncertainties in parameters, solving the hydraulic model of water distribution networks has high time complexity. In this paper, a parallel computational architecture based on the concept of cellular automata is proposed to accelerate the numerical solution of the steady-state water distribution network model. Taylor series is proposed to solve hydraulic equations. The presented architecture was implemented as a parallel hardware platform on a field-programmable gate array. The performance of the proposed method was compared with EPANET software for networks with different complexities and topologies. The results show that the proposed parallel algorithm can accelerate the hydraulic analysis of regular water distribution networks up to 700 times and 250 times for small and large networks, respectively. • Proposed CA architectures to solve a system of non-linear equations on a fine-grain parallel architecture. • An efficient method to reduce computation time for hydraulic analysis of water networks. • The synthesizable hardware descriptions were generated through design automation. • Accelerate the hydraulic analysis of WDNs up to 700 times compared to EPANET, a well-known hydraulic analysis tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]