Shankar Narasimhan S

Water Distribution Networks in many rural areas supply water from storage reservoirs at the source of water to a group of villages through gravity or by pumping. Due to poor operational policies, they often fail to meet the demand of the beneficiary villages. This work proposes a rational technique for scheduling the supply in such networks to maximize the water delivered to the villages in an equitable manner. A secondary objective is to minimize the number of valve operations. The problem is formulated as a LP followed by an ILP. The parameters in the optimization problem are obtained by simulations of a well calibrated hydraulic model or experimental data if such a model is not available.

Optimal operation of water distribution networks can be posed as a scheduling problem where the objective is to meet the time varying demand while meeting constraints on supply, pressure etc. In the present work, we propose a robust optimization problem to address uncertainty in the parameters of the model used for optimization. The resulting problem is a second order cone program that can be solved efficiently. The formulation ensures a high probability of meeting the demands, adding to the practical significance. Further, we provide the results of applying this technique on a laboratory scale water distribution network.