Combined Energy and Pressure Management in Water Distribution Systems

In this paper a method is proposed for combined energy and pressure management via integration and coordination of pump scheduling with pressure control aspects. The proposed solution involves: formulation of an optimisation problem with the cost function being the total cost of water treatment and pumps energy usage, utilisation of an hydraulic model of the network with pressure dependent leakage, and inclusion of a PRV model with the PRV set-points included as a set of decision variables. Such problem formulation led to the optimizer attempting to reduce both energy usage and leakage. The developed algorithm has been integrated into a modelling, simulation and optimisation environment called FINESSE. The case study selected is a major water supply network, being part of Yorkshire Water Services, with a total average demand of 400 l/s.