Enhancing resilience in urban water systems for future cities
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Water Supply
Abstract
In future cities, urban water systems (UWSs) should be designed not only for safe provision of services
but should also be resilient to emerging or unexpected threats that lead to catastrophic system failure
impacts and consequences. Resilience can potentially be built into UWSs by implementing a range of
strategies, for example by embedding redundancy and flexibility in system design, or by rehabilitation
to increase their ability to maintain acceptable customer service levels during unexpected system
failures. In this work, a new resilience analysis is carried out to investigate the performance of a water
distribution system (WDS) and an urban drainage system (UDS) during pipe failure scenarios. Using
simplified synthetic networks, the effect of implementing adaptation (resilient design) strategies on
minimising the loss of system functionality and cost of UWSs is investigated. Study results for the WDS
case study showthat the design strategy in which flexibility is enhanced ensures that all customers are
served during single pipe failure scenarios. The results of the UDS case study indicate that the design
strategy incorporating upstream distributed storage tanks minimises flood volume and mean duration
of nodal flooding by 50.1% and 46.7%, respectively, even when system functionality is significantly
degraded. When costs associated with failure are considered, resilient design strategies could prove
to be more cost-effective over the design life of UWSs.
Description
Keywords
flexibility, pipe failure, redundancy, resilience, urban water systems
Citation
Mugume, S. N., Diao, K., Astaraie-Imani, M., Fu, G., Farmani, R., & Butler, D. (2015). Enhancing resilience in urban water systems for future cities. Water Science and Technology: Water Supply, 15(6), 1343-1352.