Improving Resilience in Water Distribution System

There has been an emerging realization that resilient water infrastructure is critical to ensuring sustainable urban water management. A water distribution system (WDS) including the pipe network is one of the critical components of the water supply system that ensures delivering adequate safe water to the end-users. Natural events such as earthquakes and climate change may result in preventing the WDS from continuing its critical services. Thus, it is crucial to evaluate the system's resilience against disaster. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the resilience of the system that is subjected to exceptional failure conditions. The global resilience analysis (GRA) approach is utilized to measure the resilience of the WDS. Hypothetical simulations of failure scenarios are tested to evaluate the resiliency of WDS by using (Water CAD). The model of WDS in the University City, Sharjah, is utilized to apply the proposed approach. For each failure scenario, the corresponding failure impacts such as supply shortage and contaminated pipes are identified. The results revealed that the failure scenario with the highest supply shortage percentage was 98.95% and the corresponding ratio of the contaminated pipe was 0.57. Additionally, it revealed that the supply shortage depends on the criticality of the pipe in the WDS. (e.g., almost full supply shortage with only 1% pipe failure). It indicates that a small number of critical components can almost prevent the entire system from supplying the water to the end-users, while a large number of failed components in other scenarios can still supply 55–90% of the demand to the end-users. The study concludes that GRA provides an overview of the resilience of WDS to extreme failure scenarios and quantifies the resilience of the system.