MULTI-THREADED SIMULATION OPTIMIZATION PLATFORM FOR REDUCING ENERGY USE IN LARGE-SCALE WATER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS WITH HIGH DIMENSIONS

Hydraulic simulation models are used to improve the energy use of pumps at water distribution networks through simulation optimizations by selecting operating policies which reduce energy usage while meeting customer water demand. Typical simulated optimizations of complex hydraulic systems have high dimensional decision spaces and require significant time to evaluate. This study presents the design of a new multi-threaded simulation optimization software platform to determine pump operations for water distribution networks. The platform explores rule-based controls for pumps using derivative-free simulation optimization methods as independent, parallelized computational tasks. Decision spaces are reduced through domain division which produces smaller subproblems to be sequentially optimized. The platform is applied to a real urban water distribution system case study to determine energy efficient pump operating policies. The performance of several optimization techniques are compared, indicating that domain division approaches may improve consistency of optimization but are not necessarily beneficial for all optimization techniques.