OPTIMAL LOCATION AND REGULATION OF FLOW CONTROL VALVES FOR LEAKAGE REDUCTION IN WATER PIPE NETWORKS

This paper addresses the problem of minimization of leakage in water distribution networks through the introduction and regulation of Flow Control Valves FCVs. This problem is formulated as two objectives problem and is solved using multi-objective genetic algorithm. The first objective is to minimize the number of valves a surrogate for installation valves cost and the second one is represented by the minimization of the total leakage in the system while achieving the required pressure constraint at each node. The great advantage of this study is that, in one run, several trade-off optimal solutions are obtained with a different level of compromise between the conflicting two objectives. Each solution from these optimal ones consists of: minimum number of FCVs, the best locations for the obtained number of valves and optimum valves settings, not only at one time period, but at each time period through the day according to the used temporal pattern. All these results can be obtained in the same run. A new optimization model is originally written and its performance is checked by application to the well known pipe network from literature. Result of this study shows that reduction of total leakage can be obtained with the smallest number of valves when they are optimally located in the network.