A Software Tool for Reliability, Analysis, and Security Assessment of Water Distribution Systems

Water utilities have become more and more concerned with the service performance, reliability and resilience of water distribution systems (WDS). The objective of this study is to develop a software tool based on GIS for the comprehensive analysis and assessment of WDS. The software integrates EPANET to perform hydraulic and water quality simulations. The software consists of three modules: performance assessment, reliability analysis and post-earthquake restorability estimation. The module of the performance assessment comprises three elements: i.e., state variable, service curve and operator function. In the reliability analysis module, the reliability index of the node is obtained by the use of Euclidean distance. The nodal demands are weighted to generate the reliability index of the entire network system. In the module of the post-earthquake restorability estimation, the leakage magnitude is modeled and a hydraulic simulation is performed by EPANET. The restorability of the entire network system can be evaluated by the software. The outputs of the software can give a straightforward understanding of the results that contribute to the knowledge of the water distribution system.