Management of water distribution systems in emergency conditions with a nodal demand control by a calibration approach

The management of Water Distribution Systems (WDS) is strictly connected to the emergency conditions management. Critical events, such as a failure in one or more pipes, can cause the inefficiency of the network, so the head in some nodes (critical nodes) could be inadequate to guarantee the service for the users. In this paper, a new methodology that operate a nodal demand control during the time between the failure and the rehabilitation has been proposed. The aim is to preserve the consumer demand at some critical nodes (i.e. hospitals, vulnerable customers, etc.) where it must be guaranteed even for temporary and restricted service interruptions. The methodology is based on a nodal demand calibration technique with a fixed value of head in critical nodes. The model used is UNINET (Veltri et al., 2010 [1]), based on a Bayesian-statistical approach linked to a Pressure Driven Analysis (PDA).The results obtained for the two case studies presented prove the efficiency of the methodology.