Optimal Locations of Monitoring Stations in Water Distribution System

The Safe Drinking Water Act requires that the water quality in water distribution systems is to be sampled at locations that are representative of the system; but the act does not describe how the sampling should be done. In this research, a concept of coverage is defined, and methods on how to locate monitoring stations in a network are described. The best set of stations is one that maximizes the coverage. The problems were formulated as integer programming problems, and were solved on a PC using an integer programming code. Two examples of their application to real systems are shown.