Reliability based optimal design of a municipal water supply pipe network

This paper intends to provide a detailed methodology on the development of the optimization model including reliability for design of water distribution networks using genetic algorithms (GA) and EPANET in the MATLAB environment. The coding developed is easy to use and also flexible. A new parameter is proposed to determine the overall network reliability using network nodal demands and their corresponding satisfaction indices and is incorporated in the optimization model. The proposed methodology is tested on a standard Hanoi network. After several runs and out of many optimal solutions obtained, the solution with a total cost of 7.78 million associated with a reliability of 0.7323 is considered as the best and the corresponding results are presented and compared with previous research.