Experimental Validation of Design and Operation for Resilience of Water Distribution Systems

<p dir="ltr">Many approaches for achieving resilience in water distributions systems through designing topologies and measuring resilience of system design and operation have been proposed, though not validated in practice. The presented work uses a physical test rig to experimentally validate the design approach of decentralisation and adaptivity along with the resilience functions monitoring and reacting. Three topological configurations and three operation strategies are combined for six system setups implemented on the test rig and each is exposed to three distinct disruptions. The results show that a decentralised but adaptive topology with monitoring and reacting functions increase overall resilience, but at the cost of increased energy consumption.</p><p dir="ltr">This paper was presented at the 21st Computing and Control in the Water Industry Conference (CCWI 2025) at the University of Sheffield (1st - 3rd September 2025).</p>