Papers and Research

The Battle of the Water Calibration Networks (BWCN)

The Battle of the Water Calibration Networks (BWCN)

Following the Battle of the Water Networks (BWN) in 1985 and more recently the Battle of the Water Sensor Networks (BWSN) I’m happy to announce the Battle of the Water Calibration Networks (BWCN):
The BWCN calls for teams/individuals from academia, consulting firms, and utilities to propose a calibration methodology and apply it to a real water [...]

A History of Water Distribution

A History of Water Distribution: Bentley’s Tom Walski takes you back in time to learn how water distribution technology has evolved to provide us with clean and sufficient water today.
As published in Journal AWWA, Vol. 98, No. 3 (March 2006). American Water Works Association
Full paper

EPA Releases Tool to Help Small Drinking Water Systems

EPA has released a new tool for small water utilities trying to balance the demands for quality water with their financial ability to deliver. The tool is part of an overall program to protect public health, support small water systems and keep costs of water manageable. The targeted systems serve 3,300 customers or fewer.
The document, [...]

Optimizing Pumping Systems Article

With pumping systems accounting for about 20% of the world’s energy usage, a great potential for cost and energy savings exists within such systems. Unfortunately, pumping system design engineers work in an environment where budget and schedule constraints limit their ability to optimize their systems using traditional methods. “Optimizing Pumping Systems To Minimize First Or [...]

Finding Direction for Your Distribution Flushing Program

An article by the Safe Drinking Water Trust:
Distribution system flushing programs have been around for a long, long time. In a nutshell, these programs provide systems with an organized way to clean out the rust and other sediments that have settled in the water lines over the years. Whether water system crews simply crack open [...]

Darwin Designer team won honorable mention for the “Humies” Award

The Human-Competitive Awards, the “Humies”, are awarded to techniques of genetic and evolutionary computation that are competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans.
The Darwin Designer team, from Haestad Methods, won an honorable mention this year for their water distribution design genetic algorithm solver. The method is presented in “OPTIMIZING WATER SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT FOR [...]

Battle Of The Sensors – Initial announcement

Here is a message from Dr. Avi Ostfeld:
Dear Colleagues,
On May 26, 2005 I have issued a call to this list on a “Battle of the Sensors” exercise as part of the planned Special Issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security. Since than I have worked [...]

Implementing an Energy Management System for Distribution Pumping

Derceto, Inc. were one of the exhibitors at the AWWA Annual Conference (ACE05) in San Francisco in June. The company released an article titled: “Implementing an Energy Management System for Distribution Pumping“.
Here are a few words taken from the publication just to get you started:
The system generates an optimized pump schedule solution for the [...]

EPANET Toolkit adaption to GNU/Linux

Manuel López-Ibáñez, currently at the School of the Built Environment of Napier University in Edinburgh (UK), adapted the EPANET Toolkit version 2.00.10 to GNU/Linux.
A number of new features were added:

Calculation of pump switches
Saves time of day (in seconds) when a pump changes its status. The vector of pump scheduling is obtained using ENgetlinkvalue()
ENgetnodevalue() can return [...]

Battle of the Sensors

Following the cal for the Special JWRPM Issue on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security, Avi Ostfeld sent the information regarding the “Battle of the Sensors”:

Dear Colleagues,
Following my announcement of yesterday on a Special Issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security, here are a few more [...]