Sensor Placement Guidance for Small Utilities

Contamination warning systems (CWS) are strategies to lessen the effects of contamination in water distribution systems by delivering early indication of events. A critical component of CWS, online quality monitoring, involves a network of sensors that assess water quality and alert an operator of contamination. Utilities developing these monitoring systems are faced with the decision of what locations are optimal for deployment of sensors. The TEVA-SPOT software was developed to analyze the vulnerability of systems and aid utilities in designing sensor networks. However, many small utilities do not have the technical or financial resources needed to effectively use TEVA-SPOT. As a result, a sensor placement algorithm (i.e. water quality sensor placement tool-WQSPT) was developed and implemented in a commercial network distribution modeling software (i.e. KYPIPE) as a simple tool to aid small utilities in sensor placement. The developed tool was validated using 12 small distribution system models and multiple contamination scenarios for the placement of one and two sensors. Results were compared with data from identical simulations runs in TEVA-SPOT to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Because the proposed algorithm uses a simple complete enumeration strategy for sensor placement, the algorithm was able to select the same or superior nodes to those selected by TEVA-SPOT.