Calibration of Water Distribution Network Models as a Tool for Detecting Missing and Erroneous Cadastral and Hydraulic Information

In the first place, this paper presents an examination of the effects of missing cadastral information on the modeling and calibration of water distribution networks (WDN). For this purpose, cadastral errors were artificially introduced to the hydraulic models of the WDN of three cities of the province of Valle del Cauca (Colombia), with population in the range of 15,000–30,000 inhabitants. The cadastral errors were introduced by eliminating some pipes from the unaltered models using the resilience index as selection criterion. From this examination, typical responses observed during the calibration process were associated to specific topological and hydraulic errors and it was also noted that there is a direct relation between the resilience index and the effect of the removal of a certain pipe on the hydraulic performance of the model. In the second place, after identifying the effects of missing and erroneous cadastral and hydraulic information on the calibration of WDN models, the inverse procedure was carried out: the calibration process was used as a tool for detecting missing and erroneous cadastral and hydraulic information. This methodology was successfully applied to the WDN of Sector Estadio (250,000 inhabitants), which is a complex area of the city of Bucaramanga (Colombia); through the calibration of this WDN, errors such as failing water meters, pipes and valves that existed in the real system but were not in the model, significant errors in pipe diameters in the model, among others, were identified.