Abstract
When leak sensors are actually mounted on water pipelines, the locations for deploying them would be at the auxiliary equipment such as the gate valves installed every few hundred meters and fire hydrants. The total length of water pipelines laid throughout Japan is some 600,000 kilometers. Assuming a length of several thousand kilometers for the pipelines in a given target area, the possible locations for deploying sensors can number in the tens of thousands. Mounting sensors on all the possible locations would hardly be efficient, either economically or from a maintenance standpoint. On a pipeline network spreading out horizontally, it is important to ensure that the sensors are deployed in a way to maximize their effectiveness in detecting water leakages. To this end, a method is needed for objectively planning deployment of a given number of sensors on the optimal gate valves and hydrants. This study, aimed at optimal deployment of leak sensors on a water pipeline network, proposes a planning model applying the k-median problem, a kind of mathematical optimization problem, and verifies the effectiveness of this model by means of case studies.
