Resilience-driven multiobjective restoration planning for water distribution networks

Abstract

Sustaining functionality of water distribution networks (WDNs) following hazardous events is essential to public health and safety. Developing efficient restoration plans for rapid recovery is needed because of several factors such as the ubiquitous nature of WDNs, severely deteriorated segments, increased level of urbanization, availability of various restoration methods, and possible uncertainties in time and cost estimates of such methods. This paper presents a multiobjective resilience-based optimization model that maximizes the resilience of WDNs while minimizing the total time and cost of the selected restoration plans. A real WDN was utilized to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed model. The problem was solved deterministically and stochastically to generate a prioritized list of segments to be restored along with a schedule of their restoration that accounts for available work crews. When compared with current planning practices, the output plan achieved 4% cost saving, 48% duration reduction, and 4% resilience improvement. The model is expected to help city managers establish optimal restoration plans, especially in cases of limited budget and workforce.