Resilience evaluation for water distribution system based on partial nodes' hydraulic information.

Accurate resilience evaluation for water distribution systems generally requires all nodes' hydraulic data which are usually obtained from a well-calibrated hydraulic model. However, in reality, few utilities maintain a workable hydraulic model, making the resilience evaluation far more from practicability. Under this condition, whether resilience evaluation can be realized based on a small amount of monitoring nodes is still a research gap. Therefore, this paper investigates the possibility of accurate resilience evaluation using partial nodes by answering two problems: (1) whether the importance of nodes differs in resilience evaluation; (2) what proportion of nodes are indispensable in resilience evaluation. Accordingly, the Gini index of nodes' importance and the error distribution of partial node resilience evaluation are computed and analyzed. A database including 192 networks is used. Results show that the importance of nodes in the resilience evaluation varies. The Gini index of nodes' importance is 0.604 ± 0.106. The proportion of nodes that meet the accuracy requirement of resilience evaluation is 6.5% ± 2%. Further analysis shows that the importance of nodes is determined by the transmission efficiency between water sources and consumption nodes, and the degree of a node's influence on other nodes. The optimal proportion of required nodes is controlled by a network's centralization, centrality, and efficiency. These results show that accurate resilience evaluation using partial nodes' hydraulic data is feasible and provide some basis for the resilience evaluation-orientated selection of monitoring nodes.