AGIS based Decision Support System For Management of Water Distribution Networks- Nablus City Case Study رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

Water is very important for every living creature. Palestinians face many challenges of access to safe and sufficient drinking water under the existing circumstances because of restricted water allocations. Water data are available at many municipalities but they are not ordered in suitable way that can facilitate decision making and problem detection so all water data must be collected, edited and managed more professionally in order to analyze it and be able to get informed. Water resource management is an integrated process of planning, developing, distributing and managing the optimum use of water resources. The use of GIS provides better awareness tools for water distribution network. Based on GIS we can detect and localize pipe breaks very fast after they occur using water network analysis. The proposed model provides a template framework used in all countries that have an intermittent water supply system. Intermittent water supply system is not continuous supply, so municipalities need to use pump water cycles to provide a specific zone with enough water. This research aims at enhancing water system to have the ability for monitoring and analyzing water distribution system in Nablus. Geographic information system GIS was integrated with the hydraulic simulation model (WaterGEMS) software [1] to build water network that supports the intermittent water supply system. WaterGEMS is hydraulic modeling software that can be used to simulate water network with its entire component. I chose WaterGEMS rather than EPANET software because WaterGEMS has the ability to deal with shape-files as the III output files in the results of connected geometric network prepared using ArcGIS software which has the ability of adding control information in WaterGEMS to manage intermittent water supply system. GIS were used to build the geometric network, check the connectivity between network components, perform Network Analysis, improve data access and querying process, find loops and different problems such as finding connected or disconnected parts in water supply system, and discover how to reconnect it. Finding losses in the network based on two approaches; the hydraulic analysis leak detection approach which compares the model flow and pressure values to the SCADA flow and pressure values at specific time within a specific zone to detect if there is a water loss in that zone. The other approach used is the Minimum Night Flow (MNF) which compares water network input to their output. Leak can be calculated by the difference between water flow entering the pipeline (supplied) and the output from the pipeline (consumed) by reading the customer meters as a consumed (output) value. Losses can be classified into real losses and commercial losses. Detection of real losses was performed using the MNF approach. ArcObjects and VB programming under Visual Studio program were used to build an application that performs leak detection using the required data for the required zone. I have also created a desktop application that reads the shape-file data which fetches the required data for the required calculation for the required zone then the system takes all the modified data in the geometric network in addition to the hydraulic model results to show problems and leaks in the connected water network and so to calculate real losses. Bulk meters were used to detect commercial losses.