Allocating security resources to a water supply network

This paper develops a method for allocating a security budget to a water supply network so as to maximize the network’s resilience to physical attack. The method integrates max-min linear programming, hydraulic simulation, and genetic algorithms for constraint generation. The objective is to find a security allocation that maximizes an attacker’s marginal cost of inflicting damage through the destruction of network components. We illustrate the method on two example networks, one large and one small, and investigate its allocation effectiveness and computational characteristics.