Methodology for Evaluating the Overall Performance of Water Distribution System

The paper proposes a new methodology for analysing and computing the overall performance of water distribution system. The methodology is based on a hierarchical system approach that begins by evaluating a set of three complementary performance indicators which are reliability, resiliency and vulnerability. All the indicators are assessed regarding three aspects namely water pressure, available flow and free residual chlorine concentration, which can be divided broadly into hydraulic and quality aspects. Each indicator is in reality a global indicator resulting from the aggregation of the same kind of indicator assessed looking to the three mentioned aspects. Then, a model is developed that aggregates all the indicators into a one index that depicts the overall performance. The process of aggregation is done through the integration of the analytical hierarchy technique with fuzzy logic approach. The first assign weight for each indicator that reflects its relative importance among the other indicators. The second is a fuzzy rule building methodology that uses the assigned weight and others external information to harmonize all the indicators into the same platform and obtain the overall performance. To show the applicability of the current approach, the methodology has been applied to a real water distribution network.