MULTI OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION OF SENSOR PLACEMENT IN WATER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Placement of water quality sensor has received an increasing concern for timely providing the warning of possible contamination in a water system. Due to the large dimension of water distribution network and the difficulty for predicting where a contamination event occurs, it is a great challenge for engineers to come up with good sensor locations with any confidence to effectively detect possible contamination events. The problem is complicated by the fact that sensor location is evaluated against a number of objective criteria that may include the detection likelihood, the expected detection time, affected population and contaminated water consumption. A design that improves one objective may deteriorate another. In this paper, sensor placement is formulated as a multi objective optimization problem that is solved by using a competent genetic algorithm while the contamination events are simulated by the latest development of Monte Carlo method.