A Rule Based Water Quality Sensor Placement Method for Water Supply Systems Using Network Topology

Water supply systems are vital infrastructures that need to be monitored continuously for detection of any abnormal condition. Sensor placement is a key step that directly affects the success of a monitoring system. Therefore, the location and number of sensors should be carefully determined. To deal this problem, this paper presents a novel approach for efficiently determining the number and location of quality sensors based on the network topology and shortest path tree. The proposed method aims to maximize the number of monitored nodes with some simple rules and relies only on a hydraulic model. The results from tests on three benchmark water distribution networks with different sizes show that the proposed approach yields similar results to optimization tools while the proposed method is simpler and has less computational burden. Also, by increasing the size of the network and the number of sensors, the proposed method outperforms the optimization technique in some cases. Although the presented method has been focused on maximizing the number of monitored nodes, future works can extend it by addressing objectives beyond the number of monitored nodes.