Locating Pressure Control Elements for Leakage Minimization in Water Supply Networks: An Optimization Model

The problem of choosing the types of pressure-control elements and locating them in order to minimize leakage in water supply networks is formulated as a non-linear mixed-integer programming problem. This problem is then relaxed by linearizing the pressure-flow relationships to yield a linear mixed-integer programming problem, which is solved by a branch and bound procedure. The relaxed problems at each node of the decision tree are solved by separable programming. Results of case studies to assess the efficacy and computational efficiency of the proposed models are presented and discussed.