District metered area design through multicriteria and multiobjective optimization

[EN] The design of district metered areas (DMA) in potable water supply systems is of paramount importance for water utilities to properly manage their systems. Concomitant to their main objective, namely, to deliver quality water to consumers, the benefits include leakage reduction and prompt reaction in cases of natural or malicious contamination events. Given the structure of a water distribution network (WDN), graph theory is the basis for DMA design, and clustering algorithms can be applied to perform the partitioning. However, such sectorization entails a number of network modifications (installing cut-off valves and metering and control devices) involving costs and operation changes,…