Pressure Management of Water Distribution Networks Based on Minimum Ground Elevation Difference of DMAs

Water network partitioning (WNP) represents an efficient strategy to improve management of water distribution networks, reduce water losses and monitor water quality. It consists in physically dividing of a water distribution network (WDN) into districted metered areas (DMAs) through the placement of flow meters and isolation valves on boundary pipes between DMAs. In this paper, a novel methodology for designing DMAs is proposed that provides districts with quite similar node elevations and minimizes the number of boundary pipes in order to simplify pressure management and reduce the number of devices to place into the network.