New approach to water distribution network calibration

A new approach is proposed for calibrating hydraulic network models. This procedure uses a nonlinear optimization algorithm along with a standard, off-the-shelf, network solver. Pipe roughness is adjusted until simulation results agree with the values observed in the field. To achieve realistic calibrated roughness values, the objective is to minimize the sum of the squares of the differences between the calibrated and initial pipe roughness estimates, under a set of constraints determined from a sensitivity matrix. The algorithm is applied to a sample network, and the resulting calibrated network is tested under different loading conditions.