Enhancing Seismic Resilience of Water Pipe Networks

As disasters such as earthquakes and floods become more frequent and detrimental, it is increasingly important that water infrastructure resilience be strategically enhanced to support post-disaster functionality and recovery. In this paper, we focus on the problem of strategically building seismic-resilient pipe networks to ensure direct water supply to critical customers and certain proximity to water sources for residential areas, which we formalize as the Steiner Network Problem with Coverage Constraints. We provide complexity statements of the problem and present an efficient mixed-integer linear program encoding to solve the problem. We also investigate the problem of planning partial network installments to maximize efficiency over time and propose a fast and effective sequential planning algorithm to solve it. We evaluate our algorithms on synthetic water networks and also apply them to a case study on a water service zone in Los Angeles, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods for large-scale real-world applications.