Resilience assessment of water distribution networks exposed to substance intrusion

ABSTRACT Resilience in water distribution systems is the ability to detect, respond and recover from disruptive events and calamities, such as extreme weather, natural disasters, human errors, and malicious attacks. A system’s resilience can be influenced by its topology. This study applies a novel network generation procedure based on the C-town benchmark network to produce 296 network variants with similar structures yet unique topological features. Then, a stress-testing procedure is applied to expose these variants to a set of substance intrusion scenarios. Finally, their performance is ranked according to a set of resilience metrics, and their relationship to the network design is evaluated based on topological attributes through correlation analysis. The results suggest that specific topological attributes, often characterized as a branched network design, tend to be more resilient when exposed to quality-related failures. As such, it provides insights into the relationship between topology and resilience of water distribution systems.