Designing a Multi-Period Water Distribution Network with a Hybrid Simulated Annealing

Abstract

The design optimization of water distribution systems, considering multi-period restrictions with time varying demand patterns, is a complex optimization problem present in modern cities. Taking into account this issue, we propose a hybrid optimization technique based on Simulated Annealing (HSA) enhanced with a local search procedure, in order to obtain good quality networks designs. The SA performance is very sensitive to the choice of the cooling scheme, which includes parameters as the cooling function and the initial temperature. For this reason, we have analysed the HSA behaviour using proportional, exponential, logarithmic and a new random cooling functions and three different initial temperatures. An extensive experimentation using different benchmark networks has been carried out to test our proposals. Moreover, a comparison with an approach from the literature has revealed the goodness to solve this network design problem.