Vulnerability assessment of real water distribution networks using the TV-WPN informatics tool

Abstract

The design, operation and rehabilitation of water supply systems must have an asset management strategy, addressing hydraulic, technical, economic, social, environmental, and health issues with a high level of complexity. The vulnerability assessment and the resilience increment of a water distribution networks can be supported by the emerging Theory of Vulnerability of Water Pipe Networks (TV-WPN), which allows to systematize failure scenarios and map the major disproportions between failure consequences and the initial damage. Failure scenarios are defined leading simultaneously with hydraulic capacity deterioration and structural integrity, the main issues of water networks safety.

The manual application of TV-WPN is almost impossible to be used in real-world water networks. So, it was initially tested using only simple theoretical networks, needing a new and more expeditious tool (like an automatic computation program) that could encourage its use by designers and managers of this type of hydraulic infrastructure. The recent development of the TV-WPN software tool allowed to speed up the calculation process, enabling the application of this theory to real water supply networks.

This work presents the application of tool to a real water distribution network located in a village of Braga municipality for analyze their hydraulic performance and vulnerability, as well as to check and evaluate TV-WPN performance in a real-world case. It was concluded that the frequent presence of pipelines with very low flow velocities (due to the imposition of regulatory minimum diameters) can compromise the successful application of this software to real water distribution networks, namely in rural areas where flow rates are generally lower. However it is also an opportunity for future developments.