Abstract
Methods for controlling leakage from water distribution systems vary with respect to cost and personnel requirements. The benefits of leakage reduction should be compared to the cost of alternative management options to determine which is the most cost effective. This study presents a new method for evaluating leakage from water distribution systems via combined cost benefit analysis (CBA) and uncertainty analysis. The case study considers four alternatives for leakage control. The results show that the inclusion of uncertainty analysis represents an improvement over traditional CBA where there is a high degree of uncertainty in the input data. Moreover, a clearer understanding of the available alternatives is obtained in situations where multiple alternatives show similar performances and there is no clear best choice. It was determined that in the case study distribution system, it is significantly more cost-effective to reduce leakage volumes by reactively repair broken pipes than to proactively replace them, despite large leakage losses.
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Abbreviations
- CARL:
-
Current annual real losses; leakage on transmission and/or distribution mains, at utility storage tanks and on service connections up to point of costumer metering
- CBA:
-
Cost benefit analysis
- DFM:
-
District flow meters for flow measurement on the distribution network
- DMA:
-
District-metered areas, a sectioned zone of a WDS where the flow can be univocally measured
- ILI:
-
Infrastructure leakage index, representing the ratio of CARL and UARL (Lambert et al. 1999)
- NPV:
-
Net present value is defined as the sum of the present values of cash flows over a period of time
- SCADA:
-
Supervisory control and data acquisition, a communication system
- WDS:
-
Water distribution system
- UARL:
-
Unavoidable annual real losses is the lowest technically achievable real losses and depend on service connection density, system pressure and the average length of the service connection pipes between the water mains and the consumer’s water meters.
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Acknowledgments
This study was carried out within the DRICKS drinking water research centre within the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Malm, A., Moberg, F., Rosén, L. et al. Cost-Benefit Analysis and Uncertainty Analysis of Water Loss Reduction Measures: Case Study of the Gothenburg Drinking Water Distribution System. Water Resour Manage 29, 5451–5468 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-015-1128-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-015-1128-2