Review of Metaheuristic Methodologies for Leakage Reduction and Energy Saving in Water Distribution Networks

Metaheuristic methods have emerged as powerful tools for solving complex optimization problems in various domains, including the sustainability of water distribution systems. They provide efficient and effective solutions by mimicking natural processes and searching for the optimal option within a large solution space. Despite the existence of these methods in the water distribution field for several years, a direct comparison between the various proposed solutions often proves challenging, due to the different parameter definitions used by the authors. The present review presents the solutions proposed by a total of 36 research papers taken from the Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar databases focusing on the application of metaheuristic methods for leakage reduction and energy saving in water distribution networks. The review is intended to facilitate comparative analysis among the solutions proposed by authors concerning key aspects of the optimization process. These aspects include the definition of the algorithm, the specification of the objective function, and the strategies employed for reducing the search space. The characteristics of the networks used as case studies by the reviewed papers are also presented to allow the reader to evaluate the applicability of the solutions to specific networks.