Smarter Water Network Operation Management

Abstract

[EN] Water utilities cannot operate on the basis of a regular business aiming at just increasing sales to increase revenue. They rather have to discourage demand for the sake of environmental and resource sustainability . But, how to discour age demand without affecting the financial viability of utilities, wh ile keeping a high standard service? It is one of the main challenges of the twenty first century utility management. Succeeding in this challenge requires adding a higher level of intelligence into our water systems that help us identify problems that could a llow for robust mitigation, and give us the information necessary to decide better, to act quickly and to operate efficiently. Achieving this in praxis requires efficient numerical techniques and advanced soft computing algorithms due to the comp lexity of Water Distribution Systems. Design and refurbishment tasks need the support of multi-objective evolu tionary algorithms able to deal with conflicting objectives, nonlinear ities, mixed variables and the evaluation of different working conditions dur ing the decision-making proce ss. Monitoring of service quality, especially in real-time, will benefit from efficient tec hniques of time series data treatment. Operation may be integrated into appropriate data structures, which may rely, in turn, on other types of optimization techniques. These and other use cases are proposed in this paper to illustrate how utilities can use soft computing for smarter water network operation management