Skeletonizing pipes in series within urban water distribution systems using a transient-based method

Many skeletonization methods are available to simplify the configuration of urban water distribution systems (WDS) to enable hydraulic modeling and analysis. However, these approaches are generally based on steady-state hydraulic analysis, and hence the skeletonized systems cannot represent the underlying transient properties of the original systems, resulting in potential risk when handling transient events (e.g., pipe bursts). To this end, this paper proposes a transient-based method to ensure the skeletonized systems can capture the overall transient properties of the original WDS. Two criteria are proposed as principles to skeletonize pipes in series, and three assessment metrics are adopted to evaluate the transient performance of the skeletonized systems. Two WDS are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results show that the skeletonized systems produced by the proposed approach match well with the original WDS in transient dynamics. Although not all transient details can be captured, the proposed approach significantly outperforms the traditional steady-state-based method. The proposed approach offers an important tool to enable effective skeletonization of WDS for transient modeling and analysis.