Planning of a water distribution network sensors location for a leakage isolation

Abstract

The paper presents a method of water distribution system sensors placement. Location of sensors depends on the purpose of monitoring of a network. In this paper, this objective has been defined as the ability to detect network failures (leakages). Therefore, the location of monitoring points should be designed so as to maximize the effectiveness of the location method. The main objective of the algorithm deployment of sensors is to find a placement that minimizes the number of components for the largest collection of leakages (faults) with the same signature. The simplest way of determining the best sensors placement is to use an exhaustive search method. However, even a slight increase in the number of possible sensors locations makes exhaustive search very inefficient. Therefore, the selection of sensors placement was performed by optimization using evolutionary genetic algorithm. The computations were performed on the example of the water supply network in Glubczyce town in Poland.