Step-by-Step Leakage Detection in Water Distribution Systems Based on Nodal Pressure Calibration using Genetic Algorithm

The leakage is one of the most important issues in Water Distribution Systems (WDS) which imposes huge costs to water industries. Current methods detecting leakages are costly, time consuming, and labor intensive. New methods have recently been considered based on calibrating nodal pressures. Modeling and calibrating the nodal pressure using genetic algorithm is one of these methods which unfortunately is not yet accurate enough to be applied widely on real networks and more investigations is needed in this regard. In this paper, a new approach is developed which detects and eliminate the nodes with no leakage among unknown demand nodes step-by-step. In this method, an ordinary calibration was accomplished. Some nodes with no leakages are then eliminated from the set of leaky nodes and the network was calibrated again. Several iteration of this process have shown a good improvement in the leakage detection in WDS.