Security Issues in Drinking Water Distribution Networks

Critical infrastructure security will be a key challenge in the years ahead. From a system-theoretic viewpoint, there is a need to develop rigorous design and analysis tools, suitable for addressing the security problems in the various critical infrastructures. In this work, we develop a mathematical framework suitable for addressing security issues in drinking water distribution networks. In addition, we investigate the problem of evaluating the most vulnerable node locations in the network in order to physically secure them, as well as that of determining a suitable set of locations and/or sampling locations and times, so that the effects of a contamination fault can be minimized. This work contributes to the research by presenting a mathematical formulation of the problem suitable for solving the sensor placement and manual sampling simultaneously, under realistic conditions. The optimization problem is solved using various optimization and evolutionary computation techniques. To illustrate the solution methodology, we present results based on a real water distribution network.