Bursts in water distribution systems (WDSs) lead to water wastage and negative environmental impacts. Optimizing pressure sensor placement (PSP) for effective burst detection is crucial for prompt response and adverse event mitigation. While many optimization methods are available for this purpose, their resulting PSP strategies often exhibit large variability caused by background noise or metering accuracy, representing low robustness. This consequently hinders the wide application of existing PSP methods for burst detection in WDSs. This study proposes a novel multi-objective PSP method aimed at maximizing burst detection while minimizing the number of sensors. Within this method, a new threshold metric is introduced to quantify the minimum detectable burst outflow across all pipes. The metric has the key advantage of taking into account the fact that the relative magnitude of the detectable threshold for different pipes is independent of noise, thereby addressing the low robustness issue. The proposed method is applied to three WDSs, and results show that it can consistently achieve robust optimal PSP strategies across diverse noise conditions. Comprehensive comparisons between the proposed method and the other benchmark approaches are conducted using five metrics, including detection performance and layout characteristics. These comparisons reveal the properties of each optimization method and show how detection performance is affected by various placement features. It is anticipated that the proposed method can be useful in engineering practice due to its great robustness in determining the optimal PSP strategies for burst detection in WDSs compared to other alternatives.

中文翻译：

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用于供水系统破裂检测的稳健多目标压力传感器放置方法


配水系统 (WDS) 的突发导致水资源浪费和负面环境影响。优化压力传感器放置 (PSP) 以实现有效的爆裂检测对于及时响应和缓解不良事件至关重要。虽然许多优化方法可用于此目的，但它们产生的 PSP 策略通常表现出由背景噪声或计量精度引起的较大变化，表现出鲁棒性较低。因此，这阻碍了现有 PSP 方法在 WDS 中突发检测的广泛应用。本研究提出了一种新颖的多目标 PSP 方法，旨在最大化突发检测，同时最小化传感器数量。在该方法中，引入了新的阈值度量来量化所有管道中的最小可检测突发流量。该度量的关键优点是考虑到不同管道的可检测阈值的相对大小与噪声无关，从而解决了鲁棒性低的问题。所提出的方法应用于三个 WDS，结果表明它可以在不同的噪声条件下一致地实现鲁棒的最优 PSP 策略。使用五个指标对所提出的方法与其他基准方法进行了全面比较，包括检测性能和布局特征。这些比较揭示了每种优化方法的属性，并显示了各种放置特征如何影响检测性能。与其他方法相比，该方法在确定 WDS 突发检测的最佳 PSP 策略方面具有很强的鲁棒性，预计该方法可在工程实践中发挥作用。