A simple sensor placement approach for regular monitoring and contamination detection in water distribution networks

Online sensors in water distribution networks primarily serves two purposes: (1) Assures quality of water delivered to consumers; (2) Early detection of contamination events so as to minimize its consequences. Most of the multi-objective techniques consider the second purpose and almost ignore the first purpose. In this study, a sensor placement problem is formulated to cover these two performance objectives simultaneously through maximization of: (1) Demand coverage; and (2) Time-constrained detection likelihood. These two objectives are combined into a single objective by using weights. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to obtain optimum sensor locations. The methodology is applied on a bench mark problem. Several solutions are obtained by varying the weights of two objectives. A simple method as an alternative to GA is suggested for sensor locations in large water distribution networks for reducing the computational efforts. Comparison of the two methods showed that the proposed simple method provided solutions close to that provided by GA.