District metered area design through multicriteria and multiobjective optimization

The design of district metered areas (DMA) in potable water supply systems is paramount importance for utilities to properly manage their systems. Concomitant main objective, namely, deliver quality consumers, the benefits include leakage reduction and prompt reaction cases natural or malicious contamination events. Given structure a distribution network (WDN), graph theory basis DMA design, clustering algorithms can be applied perform partitioning. However, such sectorization entails number modifications (installing cut-off valves metering control devices) involving costs operation changes, which have carefully studied optimized. complexity WDNs, optimization usually performed using metaheuristic algorithms. In turn, may single multiple-objective. this last case, large solutions, frequently integrating Pareto front, produced. decision maker has eventually choose one among them, what tough task. Multicriteria methods support step decision-making process. paper, addressed by (i) proposing modified k-means algorithm partitioning, (ii) multiobjective particle swarm suitably place partitioning devices, (iii) fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) weight four objective functions considered, (iv) technique order preference similarity ideal solution (TOPSIS) rank solutions decision. This joint approach case well-known WDN literature, results are discussed.