Design and Performance of District Metering Areas in Water Distribution Systems

In large urban areas, a number of different District Metered Areas (DMAs) layouts are possible and the comparison of possible solutions is an essential part of the decision process. Therefore, when designing DMAs in a water distribution network, practitioners have firstly to evaluate the effects caused by the introduction of the districts in the system, and secondly to compare the different alternatives to determine which one is the best to adopt. In this paper a real water distribution network is considered as a case study, various possible DMAs layouts that differ in the number and the size of the districts are developed applying an automated method and an analysis of their performances is shown.