Comparative Analysis of Reliability Indices and Hydraulic Measures for Water Distribution Network Performance Evaluation

The performance of water distribution networks (WDNs) can be quantified by several types of hydraulic measure. In design and operation of a WDN, sufficient consideration should be given to system performance, and it would be inefficient to separately consider individual characteristics of hydraulic measures. Instead, various reliability indices have been developed and utilized to evaluate the performance of WDNs; however, deciding which index to use according to a particular WDN situation has not been investigated in sufficient depth. In this regard, this study analyzes the correlation between representative reliability indices and hydraulic measures to propose the most adequate reliability index according to the desired system performance in various situations. Specifically, six hydraulic measures representing system performance were selected from the viewpoint of redundancy, robustness, and serviceability. In addition, nine indices for estimating system reliability were classified based on theoretical backgrounds such as hydraulic, topological, entropic, and mixed approaches. The correlations between the nine indices and six measures were analyzed using 17 sample hypothetical networks with different layouts, under three water supply scenarios, and the overall evaluation results for each reliability index are presented through multi-criteria decision analysis.