| In this study, reliability analysis of water distribution systems is performed by focusing on the hydraulic failure of the water distribution system. It considers systems failures due to pressure heads at the junctions which are unable to satisfy the requirements. At first, input random variables are generated for the Monte Carlo approach by using the statistical analysis package STATISTICA, and for bootstrapping input random variables are generated by MATLAB. The hydraulic simulation software EPANET is used to perform hydraulic analysis for each set of generated input random variables, and nodal pressures are calculated. Finally, nodal and system reliability is calculated by adopting a minimum cut set approach, which involves the use of pipe failure probabilities. A methodology based on Generic Expectation Function (GEF) is developed to calculate a pipe failure probability which is found to be more realistic.; In this study, based on the described methodology, reliability analysis is performed for Al-Khobar water distribution system. The results show that the hydraulic reliability of Al-Khobar water distribution system is approximately 67%, indicating low hydraulic reliability compared to similar distribution systems. Accordingly, the study proposes several recommendations to improve the hydraulic reliability of Al-Khobar water distribution system. |
