INCORPORATING RELIABILITY IN OPTIMAL-DESIGN OF WATER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS - REVIEW AND NEW CONCEPTS

Much of the effort in optimal design of water distribution networks (W DNs) has focussed so far on minimizing cost alone, with little emphasi s on reliability or on investigating the tradeoff between cost and rel iability. This is a consequence of the difficulty in defining reliabil ity measures which are meaningful and appropriate, while still of a fo rm which can be incorporated directly into optimization models. This p aper will deal with these issues. It contains three parts: (1) concept ual discussion of reliability definitions from different points of vie w (system versus consumers), (2) a literature survey of existing techn iques to incorporate reliability in the optimal design of WDNs, and (3 ) a new concept for explicitly including reliability in the optimal de sign of WDNs.