Criticality Index for Resilience Analysis of Water Distribution Networks in a Context of Mechanical Failures

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are one of the most important urban complex infrastructures, which provide an essential resource for life. Therefore, ensuring resilience and safety for WDNs are big concerns for water utilities. WDNs are characterized by multiple components that are usually represented by a graph, i.e. a set of interconnected nodes or demand points and links or pipes. Node importance for a WDN depends on various factors such as population sensitivities, the location in the graph, and the system performance. Whilst pipe importance is related to measuring both risk of system isolation and insufficient pressures. This work attempts to explore consequences of pipe failures into the system’s performance. The approach is applied in a simple benchmark network. For this network, a pipe burst event followed by two different isolation actions are analyzed. The impact on the network performance of each of the applied scenarios is assessed through a resilience criticality index specifically tailored to WDNs and also compared to normal operating conditions regarding the satisfaction rate of nodal demands. The obtained results are promising in order to quantifies how resilient the system is, and supports the decision-making process to eventually reduce the occurrence of failure events and to minimize their potential consequences. The results of this study are presented, interpreted, analyzed and discussed in this paper.