Economic design of water distribution systems in buildings

This article discusses an engineering optimization problem which arises in hydraulics and is related to the use of a new criterion for sizing water distribution piping in large buildings. The optimization model aims to find the most suitable interior pipe diameters for the various pipes in the system, using commercial sizes and minimizing the overall installation cost according to some boundary conditions. The problem is formulated as a non-convex nonlinear program and a branch-and-bound algorithm is introduced for its solution. A procedure is proposed to obtain a feasible solution with standard values from the optimal solution of the non-convex program. The performance of the algorithm is analysed for a real-life problem and the cost of the computed solution is assessed, showing the appropriateness of the model and the optimization techniques.