Optimal Design of Pipes in Series with Pressure Driven Demands

This paper presents an approach that combines concepts of energy use and the ILP to find near-optimal solutions for the optimal design of pipes in series systems in a reduced amount of time. The proposed methodology predefines the head in each node based on known criteria developed by past research on optimal design of looped demand-driven networks. Once the heads are available, the demands are calculated with the demand-pressure function and then the problem is solved as demand-driven with ILP. Taking into account that the resulting design can be unfeasible because of the probable changes in the nodes' heads and therefore in the demand flows, there are needed various iterations of the methodology that explore the head assignation space in an intelligent way. The methodology is tested for different scenarios showing the advantages of this approach.