Operational and tactical management of water and energy resources in pressurized systems: Competition at WDSA 2014

Optimal management of water and energy resources worldwide is a basis for environmental and socioeconomic sustainability in urban areas, which has become even more relevant with the advent of the smart and water sensitive city paradigm. In water distribution networks (WDNs) water resource management is concerned with increased efficiency, which is primarily related to the reduction of leakages, whereas energy management refers to optimal pump, valve, and source scheduling strategies considering the hydraulic system requirements. These management goals require planning of asset renewal and improvement works in the short time (operational) and medium time (tactical) horizons, considering the financial sustainability of relevant actions. The battle of background leakage assessment for water networks (BBLAWN) was designed as a competition held at the 16th Water Distribution Systems Analysis Conference, in Bari (Italy) in 2014 (WDSA), to address the aforementioned management goals. The teams taking part in the BBLAWN were asked to develop a methodology for both reducing real water losses and saving energy in a real WDN considering the possibility of asset renewal and strengthening. Fourteen teams from academia, research centers, and industry presented their solutions at a special session of the WDSA 2014 conference. This paper briefly describes the BBLAWN and presents one of the solutions provided by the organizers to illustrate the ideas and challenges embedded in the posed problem. The overview of the solutions provided by the participants shows that management decisions need to be supported by engineering judgment and with tools that combine computationally effective multiobjective optimization and hydraulic models capable of assessing pressure-dependent background leakages. © 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.