Patent ID: 8265911

Claim:
A method comprising: defining a hydraulic model of a water distribution or collection system in a hydraulic modeling and simulation application executing on a computer system, the hydraulic model including link elements and node elements that define a configuration, at least one node element representing a variable speed pump (VSP) having a tank located on the VSP's discharge side that serves as the VSP's control node in the configuration or having a tank located on the VSP's suction side that serves as the VSP's control node in the configuration; initializing values of one or more hydraulic heads and link flows in the hydraulic model; computing system matrixes descriptive of the hydraulic model; solving the matrixes to determine new values of the one or more hydraulic heads; updating link flows from current values to new values based upon the new values of the one or more hydraulic heads; repeating the steps of computing, solving and updating until a change between current values to new values of link flows is less than a predetermined accuracy tolerance; causing the VSP to be set to an operating status of off, or to a variable speed mode of operation, depending on tank level at the VSP's control node in relation to a target level at the VSP's control node; when the VSP is set to a variable speed mode of operation, using the new values of link flows and hydraulic heads to calculate at least one VSP speed at a time step; further repeating the steps of initializing, computing, solving, updating, repeating, and using for a plurality of time steps, with the VSP being set to each of the operating status of off and the variable speed mode of operation for at least some time steps, until a current time step is determined to be greater than a simulation duration; and including the at least one VSP speed at each time step in results of a simulation of the hydraulic model, the results displayed to a user by the computer system.