Impacts of Nodal Demand Allocations on Transient-Based Skeletonization of Water Distribution Systems

Urban water distribution systems (WDSs) are often skeletonized to enable efficient system analysis and management. While different methods are available to account for transient dynamics within the skeletonization processes, they often ignore the potential impacts induced by nodal demand allocations. This paper proposes a transient-based method to skeletonize pipes in series with internal demands, where the optimal demand allocation strategy is determined by a minimization approach associated with a probabilistic evaluation method. In addition, this paper makes the first attempt to investigate the impacts of different nodal demand allocation strategies on reproducing transient dynamics within the skeletonization process. The proposed method is demonstrated for a hypothetical transmission system and a realistic WDS. Results show that the impact of demand allocations on transient dynamics is positively correlated with demand values and that the proposed skeletonization method overall outperforms the traditional methods in capturing the transient dynamics of the original WDS, especially for nodes with relatively large demands.