Resilience-driven sustainability-based rehabilitation planning for water distribution networks

Abstract

Water distribution networks (WDNs) confront momentous challenges, including the need to meet continuously increased demand, combat unforeseen disruptions, and reduce carbon emissions. Developing efficient plans for resilience enhancement of WDNs thus is essential recognizing the ubiquitous nature of WDNs and increased frequency and destructive severity of hazardous events. This paper presents a resilience-driven multiobjective optimization model to maximize the resilience of WDNs while minimizing the life-cycle cost and carbon emissions. Enhancement actions first are determined and clustered into work packages, and then an optimized schedule is generated considering various operational and managerial factors. A real WDN in the city of London, Ontario, was utilized to demonstrate the proposed model's practicality. The resilience increased by 24% with CAD 1.6 million investment. Additionally, cost saving of about 33% is achievable if the proposed model is employed instead of a currently utilized practice. The developed model is expected to help city managers establish optimal resilience enhancement plans, considering tight available budgets and limited workforce.