Identifying contaminant sources for water distribution systems using a hybrid method

Abstract

The rapid discovery of the contaminant source in a water distribution system (WDS) is vital for generating an efficient control strategy during a contamination event. An inverse problem can be constructed, given sensor measurements in a WDS, to identify the contaminant source characteristics by integrating a WDS simulation model with an optimisation method. However, this approach requires numerous compute-intensive simulation runs to evaluate potential solutions. This paper reports the findings of an investigation by introducing a hybrid method for the real-time characterisation of a contaminant source. This new method integrates a simulation-optimisation approach with a logistic regression and a local improvement method to expedite the convergence and possibly solve the problem quickly. The results of numerical experiments on two example WDS networks demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid method for contaminant source characterisation. Effects of various hybrid strategies on the algorithm performance are discussed.

Keywords:

• identification
• water distribution systems
• contamination
• algorithms
• hybrid heuristic search

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Major Special Technological Program of Water Pollution Control and Management (Program No. 2009ZX07106-001), the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. CMS-0540316 under the DDDAS program, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. 2010HGBZ0560 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Grant No. 51079037.