Patent ID: 7593839

Claim:
A method of designing and rehabilitating a water distribution system, including the steps of: (A) providing a user interface with which a user makes selections; (B) passing user selected information including a design model and at least one of least cost, maximum benefit and multi-objective cost-benefit trade off as an objective for a proposed new design or rehabilitation of a water distribution system to a design evaluation module, passing user-prescribed hydraulic criteria, including at least one of minimum required junction pressure, maximum allowable junction pressure, maximum allowable pipe flow velocity, and maximum hydraulic gradient for the water distribution system to said design evaluation module, and passing demand and operating condition information including at least one of pipe sizes, cost data and link status to said design evaluation module; (C) computing at least one of a cost or a rehabilitation benefit of said proposed new design or rehabilitation for said design model and demand and operation conditions, using a genetic algorithm program application, and determining one or more solutions for the proposed new design and rehabilitation that satisfies the user-prescribed hydraulic criteria for the design model selected; (D) running one or more hydraulic simulations for each solution computed; (E) configuring said user interface to provide a representation of said one or more simulations for evaluation by a user; and wherein computing said rehabilitation benefit includes a step of calculating the hydraulic performance improvement benefit by determining junction pressure (P) improvements, wherein pressure improvement is a ratio of pressure difference between the actual pressure and a user-defined reference pressure, and the benefit is divided by the junction demand (JQ), introducing factors enabling a modeler to convert and customize the hydraulic benefit function as follows: HYbenefit = ∑ k = 1 ND ⁢ ⁢ { a ⁢ ⁢ ∑ i = 1 RJ ⁢ ⁢ ( JQ i , k JQtotal k ) ⁡ [ ( P i , k - P i , k ref ) P i , k ref ] b } JQtotal k = ∑ i = 1 RJ ⁢ ⁢ JQ i , k where a and b are user-specified factors that allow a user to weight, convert and customize pressure improvement to hydraulic benefit, and where: JQ j,k is the demand at junction i for demand alternative k, JQtotal k is the total junction demand for demand alternative k, P i,k is the post-rehabilitation pressure at junction i for demand alternative k, P i,k ref is the reference junction pressure defined by a user to evaluate the pressure improvement.