Applying Artificial Immune System to Minimize Construction Cost of Water Distribution Networks

Recent studies increasingly indicate that heuristic algorithms are powerful and effective for solving water distribution networks (WDN) optimization problems. This paper employs the artificial immune system (AIS), to solve the least-cost design problems of WDN. The well-known WDN problem, New York City tunnel problem, is used as a case study. The results reveal that the computational efficiency and quality obtained by AIS are as good as or better than the results reported in literatures. Furthermore, AIS significantly retrenches the number of iterations for searching the optimal solution. AIS is shown to be an evolutionary technique capable of solving complex combination optimization problems.