Sewer network design methodology for low-cost, resilient, and reliable designs

ABSTRACT

When designing a sewer system, the goal is to find the design with the lowest cost while complying with the hydraulic constraints. However, with the emergence of new concerns like climate change and high-density urbanization, those designs must also be reliable and resilient. This is the objective of the present research, to provide an approach for finding low-cost, sewer networks design while considering the reliability and the resilience as a criterion in the selection of the best design. For that purpose, a method is proposed for evaluating resilience and reliability in a variety of designs produced by modifying the objective function of the network’s layout selection model. The methodology was tested in four scenarios using two cost equations and two sewer network benchmarks from the literature. In most of the scenarios, it was possible to find designs with lower cost and higher resilience and reliability than those previously published.

KEYWORDS:

• sewer network design
• resilience
• reliability
• mix-integer programming
• dynamic programming
• SWMM

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Andrés Aguilar for his work in the conceptualization of the multiobjective optimization methodology and Laura Arroyo for her work in the analysis of reliability indexes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2023.2218339.