A heuristic procedure for the automatic creation of district metered areas in water distribution systems

This paper presents a procedure for the automatic creation of district metered areas (DMAs) in a water distribution system. The procedure uses techniques derived from graph theory (Breadth First Search and algorithm for finding the shortest paths in a graph) and demand-driven hydraulic simulations of the network in order to (a) divide the nodes among an assigned number of DMAs, (b) identify the “open” links between districts where flow meters will be placed and (c) identify the “closed” links between districts where isolation valves will be placed. The application of the proposed procedure to the case of a real water distribution system revealed it to be robust and effective. In particular, the results obtained show that the procedure makes it possible to identify very good solutions in terms of resilience and minimum pressures when reference to the peak demand and fire-flow conditions is made. The resulting performance indicators were better than those obtainable by applying a similar procedure previously proposed in the scientific literature