Overall Performance of Water Distribution System: A Methodology

The paper proposes a new methodology for analysing and computing the overall performance of water distribution system. The methodology is based on a hierarchical system approach that begins by evaluating a set of three complementary performance indicators namely; reliability, resiliency and vulnerability. All the indicators are assessed regarding three aspects namely water pressure, available flow and free residual chlorine concentration, which can be divided broadly into hydraulic and quality aspects. Then, a model is developed that aggregates all the indicators into a one index that depicts the overall performance. The aggregation is done through the integration of the analytical hierarchy process with fuzzy set approach. The first assign weight for each indicator that reflects its relative importance among the other indicators. The second is a fuzzy building methodology that uses the assigned weight and others external information to harmonize all indicators into the unique platform to obtain the overall performance