Design innovation leads to sustainable water distribution systems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate design alternatives for pump‐included water distribution networks considering sustainability and reliability aspects. The aim is to demonstrate that CO2 emissions could be reduced at a reasonable cost. The paper also investigates the trade‐offs between cost and reliability of water distribution networks.Design/methodology/approach – An existing genetic algorithm optimization tool is customized in this research to perform multi‐objective optimization with various objectives and constraints. The developed model is demonstrated using a benchmark water distribution network.Findings – The results from this research suggest that CO2 emissions from water distribution networks could be reduced at a reasonable cost by choosing better objectives during the design stage. High system reliability could also be ensured for the lifetime by paying reasonable additional cost. This research presents various design alternatives for an engineer to choose from.Research lim...