Optimal Placement and Regulation of Pressure Reducing Valves in Water Distribution Systems to Water Leakage Reduction

Water loss is a major concern of water utilities worldwide and it reaches a significant part of total water production. Therefore, reduction of water leakage in water distribution systems (WDSs) at economic levels to preserve drinking water has been a priority task. To reduce water leakage, Pressure Reducing Valves (PRVs) are commonly installed in WDSs to keep the operating pressure and water leakage flow under control. The engineering task of identifying optimal locations (i.e., which links) for placing PRVs can be casted as a difficult mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) where binary variables are used to represent the presence of PRVs on links. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid algorithm combining the mathematical program with complementarity constraints (MPCCs) and MINLP algorithm to address the optimal PRV locating problem efficiently. The algorithm is applied to determine optimal locations for placing PRVs in a benchmark WDS and a real-world water distribution system in a city in Vietnam. The results have shown that excessive pressures have been decreased significantly with proper placements of PRVs.