Particle Swarm Optimization applied to the design of water supply systems

In the past decade, evolutionary methods have been used by various researchers to tackle optimal design problems for water supply systems (WSS). Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is one of these evolutionary algorithms which, in spite of the fact that it has primarily been developed for the solution of optimization problems with continuous variables, has been successfully adapted in other contexts to problems with discrete variables. In this work we have applied one of the variants of this algorithm to two case studies: the Hanoi water distribution network and the New York City water supply tunnel system. Both cases occur frequently in the related literature and provide two standard networks for benchmarking studies. This allows us to present a detailed comparison of our new results with those previously obtained by other authors.