Speedup of water distribution simulation by domain decomposition

The Schur complement domain decomposition method is used for solution of large linear systems. The algorithm is based on the subdivision of the domain into smaller ones and the solution of those subdomains independently. Regarding water distribution systems modeling, the hydraulic simulation could be formulated as a sequence of systems of linear equations. Therefore, this paper utilizes the domain decomposition method to accelerate the simulation process further. The method is evaluated using a large scale real-world system with 63,616 junctions and 64,200 pipes as case study. The case study shows that the methodology could improve the performance of hydraulic simulation app. by a factor of 8 without losing accuracy at a suitable level of domain decomposition. Although the optimal level of decomposition is case specific, considerable speedup might still be achievable by decomposing a large system into only a few subsystems. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.