Optimal Near Real-Time Control of Water Distribution System Operations

The scarcity of freshwater resources, combined with deteriorating infrastructure, pushes water utilities to employ optimal operational practices to control water distribution systems (WDSs) based on objectives such as minimizing operational costs or leakages. This paper demonstrates a metaheuristic optimization framework for controlling WDS operations in near real-time by minimizing the total energy consumption, while maintaining sustainable system conditions and operations, such as those of tanks. The proposed framework, at its core, comprises a water demand forecasting model, an optimization-based control model, and a hydraulic continuity model. The hypothesis is that WDS can be controlled more efficiently by forecasting and predicting the near future system conditions based on past and prevailing conditions. Operational time steps of 60, 30, and 15 min are considered, to evaluate the benefits of using shorter operational time steps than the conventional norm. The proposed framework is demonstrated using a small-sized benchmark WDS. The results revealed that real-time control schemes reduce the operational costs of the selected WDS by up to 17.8%, with the shortest time step scheme (15 min) offering the most reduction in operational expenses, at the cost of more computational expensiveness. This study and its findings would help utilities plan more reliable and sustainable operational schemes.