ABSTRACT
Decision Support Tool for Design and Reliability Assessment of Water Distribution Networks This chapter describes the decision support tool for network design and reliability assessment (NEDRA), compiled from the software applications specifically developed for the research presented in Chapters 5 to 8. The reliability analyses that have been conducted on geometric-, hydraulic-and economic grounds all reflect the complexity of network resilience that is still difficult to generalise or classify, as well as it is impossible to asses without full integration of all three aspects. It has been therefore appropriate to conclude the research on pattern recognition for network reliability assessment by a piece of software that should be able to generate sufficient number of design scenarios, assess them in various aspects and let the user eventually draw his/her own conclusions about the best alternative, also from the reliability perspective. NEDRA is composed of the modules for network generation, filtering, initialisation, optimisation on the least-cost diameter, diagnostics of network geometric-, hydraulic-, and economic parameters and finally the assessment of network resilience. Computations can be done for single network in one or multiple scenarios, or a sequence of networks of virtually unlimited size and number, mutually similar or different in properties. The programme has been illustrated on a design example of 50-node network.
