Reliability of integrated municipal water systems during drought: Reliability bounds approach

Drought conditions pose a serious risk to the performance of integrated municipal water systems (MWS). They subject MWS to a combined effect of increased demands and decreased supplies. The performance of integrated MWS is investigated under two failure scenarios which are that: available supply is not adequate to meet the required demand; and, system distribution and treatment capacity are less than the demand rate. These failure modes may be correlated because they are driven by the same climatic conditions such as rainfall and temperature. The approach takes into account correlation between supply and demand in drought periods as well as the interdependence between the two failure modes. A novel approach is presented in estimating the reliability of integrated MWS for multiple failure modes based on the reliability bounds concept