Design of Drinking Water Distribution Networks with Consideration of Future Retrofit

Drinking water distribution networks are important because they provide water to meet basic human needs, and to protect humans in the event of fires and other public emergencies. With aging infrastructure, there is an urgent need to design water distribution networks to ensure safety and reliability of service in the future. The uncertainty that surrounds future scenarios of climate-induced drought, population levels, and urbanization patterns — all factors that influence water demand — means that a system design chosen today may be inadequate to meet future demands in a water distribution network. Water utilities often have to plan the design of their water distribution network with only limited information on future water demand levels. For example, if water demand in the future is higher than the level predicted at the time of design, then a municipality will eventually have to retrofit the system, perhaps at great expense, to meet the unanticipated water demand. Thus, there is a need for methods to design networks to minimize the need for future system retrofit under uncertain demands, and to make networks economically robust. In this paper a new framework is presented to design water distribution networks for economic robustness. Economic robustness supplements the least-cost optimality criterion by providing a measure of the variability involved in retrofit costs of a system under uncertain future conditions. In the new framework, water demand projected at the end of a 20-year planning period is treated as an uncertain quantity and modeled as a random variable with an error probability density function (PDF). In the proposed framework, new criteria such as the expected value and standard deviation of retrofit cost are developed to evaluate the economic robustness of water distribution networks. The framework is applied to a simple network, with comparison of design alternatives done on the basis of pipe cost and expected retrofit cost. The results obtained indicate that surplus hydraulic capacity lowers the uncertainty of future retrofit costs and increases confidence of retrofit cost estimates. Consequently, the results substantiate the intuitive understanding of the benefits of surplus hydraulic capacity in a system.