Optimal Control of Chlorine Concentration in Water Distribution System

Supplying high-quality water is the key task of water distribution systems (WDSs). Although in Germany and some other countries chlorine is no longer used, it remains as a major disinfectant in WDSs worldwide. Therefore, chlorine concentration represents an important parameter for determining the water quality; that is, we should ensure the chlorine concentration within a reasonable range in a WDS. However, due to the complexity of the network structure and nonlinear behavior of the system, the control of chlorine concentration in WDSs imposes a challenging task. In this study, a model-based optimal control strategy is developed to address this problem. The mass and energy conservation laws are used to describe the hydraulic properties of WDSs. The one-dimensional advective transport model is simplified to describe the decay of chlorine in the pipelines. The chlorine concentration limits at the nodes are formulated as inequality constraints which will be satisfied by manipulating the flows and their directions in the pipelines. As a result, a nonlinear optimization problem is formulated and solved to achieve the specified chlorine concentration. For verifying our approach, we deliver the computed results for benchmark networks as input to the simulation model in EPANET, and the simulation gives satisfactory values of the specified chlorine concentration in the network.