Resilience Indexes for Water Distribution Network Design: A Performance Analysis Under Demand Uncertainty

Traditionally, the optimal design of water distrubution networks has been dealt with using single‐objective constrained approaches, where the aim is to minimize the network investment cost while maintaining minimum pressure head constraints at all nodes. However, in the last decade some authors have proposed multi‐objective approaches which optimize other objectives than network investment cost. In most cases, these objectives have been formulated using the concept of resilience index, which mimics the design aim of providing excess head above the minimum allowable head at the nodes and of designing reliable loops with practicable pipe diameters. Although several authors have proposed different resilience indexes for this pupose, to date there is no empirical study that analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of these proposals. This paper evaluates the performance of a well‐known multi‐objective evolutionary algorithm, the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2, using three different resilience indexes. The results obtained in two water supply networks under a large number of simulated over‐demand scenarios show the advantages and disadvantages of these measures.