Water Distribution Network Design Optimization: Simulated Annealing Approach

A simulated annealing-based heuristic has been developed to obtain the least-cost design of a looped water distribution network. A Newton search method was used to solve the hydraulic network equations. Simulated annealing is a stochastic optimization method that can work well for large-scale optimization problems that are cast in discrete or combinatorial form, as with the problem proposed. The results obtained with this approach for networks currently appearing in the literature as case studies in this field (whose solution by other optimization methods was known) have proved the ability of the heuristic to handle this kind of problem.