Efficient post-hazard probabilistic flow analysis of water pipe networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a reliability based flow analysis framework for water pipe networks after an earthquake event. The first part of the framework is an automated leakage and breakage modeling of water pipe segments in a network damaged by an earthquake event. The second part is an efficient system-level probabilistic flow analysis based on the Matrix-based System Reliability (MSR) formulation and the branch-and-bound method. It estimates the system-level flow quantities of network pipes and the system damage state probabilities, and significantly reduces the computational costs by sequentially prioritizing the system states according to their likelihoods and by selecting their partial sets. The proposed framework is demonstrated by a water pipe network consisting of 11 pipe segments under an earthquake event, in which the statistical moments and the probability of the water flows of several pipes are estimated based on the proposed framework.