VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT OF WATER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS: GRAPH THEORY METHOD

The main functional purpose of a water distribution network is to transport water from a source to several domestic and industrial units while at the same time satisfying various requirements on hydraulic response. All the water distribution networks perform two basic operations: firstly the water network needs to deliver adequate amounts of water to meet specific requirements, and secondly the water network needs to be reliable; therefore, the required amount of water needs to be continuously available 24 hours a day and 365 days per year. Due to the inevitable failures of some components such as pump stations, reservoirs and/or pipelines in a large-scale water distribution network, in designing a reliable network, the topological structure with low vulnerability must be achieved. Consequently, the study of connectivity, which is the key graph-theoretical notion, becomes crucial. This paper highlights some fundamental concepts from graph theory for vulnerability assessment of water distribution networks, addresses the mathematical properties of the link and node-deletion problems, and outlines some well-established results on the deterministic measures to assess the fault tolerance of networks.