IMPACT OF FIREFIGHTING CAPACITY ON WATER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS DESIGN USING GENETIC ALGORITHM

Abstract

 Water Distribution Systems (WDS) are designed with some surplus capacity to meet firefighting needs as well as daily water supply. However, water companies have often overpaid the cost needed for firefighting capacity despite official specification because there are no theoretical bases to clarify cost allocation between water companies and fire departments. To better quantify additional costs derived from firefighting capacity in WDS design, this paper proposes Island Model Genetic Algorithm to internalize hydraulic simulation under fire flow. The proposed model is applied to a realistic gravity-fed WDS as a numerical experiment. The results showed that the proposed model can design WDS more accurately measuring firefighting capacity and cost allocation in a reasonable time with the support of parallelization. The generalized and rapid model proposed in this study is expected to be further applied to various WDSs.