Monitoring stations in water distribution systems to detect contamination events

Abstract

Concerns about the security have led to increased interest in identification of optimal monitoring location in water distribution systems. The primary objective of a monitoring system should be to provide warning against contamination at the earliest, i.e. contamination should be detected as quickly as possible. Several methodologies with different objectives have been suggested in the recent past for deciding the monitoring locations in water distribution networks. Most of these methods use optimization algorithms and therefore require large computational work. In this study, a simple heuristic method has been suggested for deciding the location of monitoring stations (MSs) based on the concept of ‘construction of shortest travel time trees’ to achieve targeted level of service (LOS). The LOS of a monitoring system is defined in terms of the maximum time lapse (T-hour) between the entry of contaminant at any node and its detection by any MS. The results obtained using the proposed methodology are compared with other methodology having same objective. The proposed methodology is observed to be giving comparable results. The application of methodology is extended to multi-source networks and also applied to real-life network. The proposed methodology is simple and requires less computational work.

Keywords:

• contamination
• monitoring
• security
• water distribution system
• water quality

Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to anonymous reviewers for their critical review and suggestions to improve the quality of paper. Thanks are also due to Dr M.C. Deo, Chairman, Editorial Board and other committee members for short-listing of this paper presented in HYDRO-12 for publication in ISH Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. This article belongs to the papers presented at the Hydro-2012 conference held at IIT Bombay on 7–8 December 2012 that were shortlisted by the Editor for publication in this Journal after re-review and revisions where necessary.