On the complexities of the design of water distribution networks (Q1955393)

Summary: Water supply is one of the most recognizable and important public services contributing to quality of life. Water distribution networks (WDNs) are extremely complex assets. A number of complex tasks, such as design, planning, operation, maintenance, and management, are inherently associated with such networks. In this paper, we focus on the design of a WDN, which is a wide and open problem in hydraulic engineering. This problem is a large-scale combinatorial, nonlinear, nonconvex, multiobjective optimization problem, involving various types of decision variables and many complex implicit constraints. To handle this problem, we provide a synergetic association between swarm intelligence and multiagent systems where human interaction is also enabled. This results in a powerful collaborative system for finding solutions to such a complex hydraulic engineering problem. All the ingredients have been integrated into a software tool that has also been shown to efficiently solve problems from other engineering fields.