Stochastic simulation methodology for resilience assessment of water distribution networks

Water distribution systems enable social and economic development and sustain people quality of life. However, these systems face significant performance challenges including ageing, natural disruptive events, and man-made disruptions. Physical protection of networked infrastructure distributed over large geographical areas is unfeasible. A cost-effective alternative is to enhance the water distribution system resilience: ensuring reduced system damage in case of disruption, and enhancing system capacity to recover lost performance within acceptable time and cost limits. This paper presents a novel network-based methodology to evaluate resilience of water distribution systems. This methodology utilises stochastic simulation on a network model to generate statistical data on the resilience probability of the actual water infrastructure system. The methodology is a management decision support tool for enhancing system preparedness, enabling acceptable recovery parameters, and improving the evaluation of capital investment alternatives. The network-based approach can be extended to complex networks integrating physical and non-physical assets.