OPTIMAL LOCATIONS OF MONITORING STATIONS IN WATER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
By Byoung Ho Lee and Rolf A. Deininger
Summary
The passing of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 required monitoring to be instituted in water distribution systems around the country; however, no guidance was given on how the sampling was to be executed. The authors address the best methods to locate monitoring stations in a water distribution network. The paper presents these methods by 1) defining new or relevant concepts 2) providing two examples that demonstrate the methods and concepts in real-world practice. The authors claim that the best set of stations is one that maximizes the coverage (as defined in the paper).
Discussion
This paper seems like it has lots of real-world applicability – after all, nearly every water distribution system in the US is required to monitor and I would bet that most of them are not optimizing their coverage. It has been nearly 17 years since this article was written and I would be interested if any more work has been done optimizing monitoring stations – not just research but have communities actually used this knowledge to expand their system’s coverage. If this information has merely lain on the shelf unused, I would be curious as to why. Is it too costly to implement? Are communities unaware that their systems are relatively ineffective?
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Landon
ReplyDeleteYour concern about new work done optimizing monitoring stations seems to be the same of other coleagues. I have done a quick reseach online and found a couple of papers about it. The most recent ones addresses the issue of contaminant events on purpose. Basically the same problem of regular water quality monitoring, but with more deep effects. Dr. Zechman has some research in this area. Anyway I found a very recent reference (2008) of the same problem but the optimization technique was genetic algorithm.
Optimizing water quality monitoring stations using genetic algorithms:
Al-Zahrani, MA
ARABIAN JOURNAL FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 28 (1B): 57-75 APR 2003.
I think your second point is more important. The effectiveness of the monitoring systems and whether communities are aware about it. I don't know here in US, but reality in Brazil shows that people have no idea of the contaminants riks in a water distribution system.
I have already mentioned about the study going on using genetic algorithms in optimizing the water quality monitoring stations. Its interesting to note that the recent studies are based on the methodology of Lee and Deininger but optimizing using different techniques.
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