A Stochastic Programming Formulation for Disinfectant Booster Station Placement to Protect Large-Scale Water Distribution Systems

Abstract We present a methodology for optimally locating disinfectant booster stations for response to contamination events in water distribution systems. A stochastic programming problem considering uncertainty in both the location and time of the contamination event is formulated resulting in an extensive form that is equivalent to the weighted maximum coverage problem. Although the original full-space problem is intractably large, we show a series of reductions that reduce the size of the problem by five orders of magnitude and allow solutions of the optimal placement problem for realistically sized water network models.