A Security-Oriented Manual Quality Sampling Methodology for Water Systems

The management and security of water resources will be a key challenge in the years ahead. This work investigates the water quality manual sampling scheduling problem in drinking water distribution networks. This work contributes to research by presenting a problem formulation based on the underlying substance propagation dynamics, coupled with the impact dynamics describing the “damage” caused by a contamination in a drinking water distribution network. The proposed solution methodology optimizes a risk-objective, in order to compute a manual sampling scheme comprised of sampling nodes and times, using evolutionary computation techniques. To illustrate the methodology, we present simulation results on a real water distribution network.