Geospatial Information System-Based Modeling Approach for Leakage Management in Urban Water Distribution Networks

The purpose of this paper is to model one of the urban network problems, the issue of water leakage. In order to manage water leakage, the specific area should be partially isolated from the rest of the network. As Geospatial Information System (GIS) is a powerful technology in spatial modeling, analysis and visualization of the water network management, a web GIS system for finding optimal valves to close in the event of an incident was developed. The system consists of a new GIS based algorithm for identifying the ideal valves to isolate the desired pipeline. The algorithm is able to identify optimum valves in a water distribution network in the shortest time by using the traceability in GIS web services. The system uses the functions of storing and managing the spatial data by expert users based on web 2.0 technology. The system was implemented and evaluated for Tehran’s district 5 water distribution network using Silverlight, C# and ArcGIS SDK (Software Development Kit). The evaluations demonstrated the accuracy of the algorithm and the operational viability of the system developed.