Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that the performance of a municipal water distribution system at a given time can be measured in terms of reliability. Such a measure will be very useful in developing new maintenance and rehabilitation strategies. To find the reliability measures the distribution system is converted to a stochastic network. The reliability values at various nodes of the network are computed using either the method of minimal pathsets or the method of minimal cutsets. The relative merits of the two methods are discussed and guidelines on the choice of the appropriate method are given. A complete theoretical development of the underlying methodology is presented and the procedure for converting a given water distribution system into a stochastic network is outlined. A case study network is analyzed to illustrate the theoretical developments.

This paper is only available in PDF Format:

  View full text PDF