An appraisal of source head methods for calculating the reliability of water distribution networks

This paper presents a new way of interpreting the results of the traditional demand-driven network analysis as an approximation to pressure-driven simulation so as to calculate the reliability of single-source networks. The approach is useful because most network modeling software packages use the demand-driven analysis approach and are incapable of simulating pressure-deficient conditions properly. The formulation draws from recent developments in pressure-driven simulation and can be used to calculate the reliability of an entire water distribution network or that of the individual demand nodes. The method herein is probabilistic in that the random nature of link failures is accounted for. Using a sample network, it is shown that the method has several advantages including simplicity and a very high computational efficiency.