The malfunction of the water distribution system (WDS) following severe earthquakes have significant impacts on the post-earthquake rescue. Moreover, the restoration priority of earthquake-induced pipeline damages plays an important role in improving the post-earthquake serviceability of WDS and the “seismic resilience”. Thus, to enhance the seismic resilience of WDS, this study develops a dynamic cost-benefit method and introduces three existing methods to determine the restoration priority of pipeline damages based on a quantitative resilience evaluation framework. In this resilience evaluation framework, the restoration priority is firstly determined. Then the time-varying performance of post-earthquake WDS is modeled as a discrete event dynamic system. In this model, the system state changes after the reparation of pipeline damage, and the system performance is simulated by a hydraulic model to be consistent with the system state. In this study, this method is also tested and compared with other existing methods, and the results show that the system resilience corresponding to the restoration priority obtained by this method is close to that obtained by the global optimization method with a relative difference of less than 3%, whereas the calculation complexity is about 0.4% of the optimization model. It is concluded that this proposed method is valid.

Sensor placement for disaster prevention for important users in urban water distribution networks is essential for post-earthquake monitoring and repair. Herein, we proposed a sensor placement approach for disaster prevention monitoring for important users, to (a) improve the fault diagnosis ability of the water distribution network and to (b) guarantee the function of emergency services for key nodes after an earthquake. First, an evaluation system of node users’ disaster prevention impact factors was presented to evaluate the node influence degree from three aspects: post-earthquake leakage, emergency support and topology structure; and the weight values of node users’ disaster prevention impact factors were obtained. Second, a post-earthquake hydraulic analysis model based on the pressure-driven demand was used to calculate the water shortage ratio of nodes. Third, using the three-way clustering integration method, the results of four clustering techniques were integrated to divide the monitoring domain in the water distribution network based on sensitivity analysis. Finally, on basis of the sensitivity matrix, the division of the monitoring area and the impact factors of node users’ disaster prevention were combined to place sensors for post-earthquake disaster prevention in the water distribution network. Detailed computational experiments for a real urban water network in China were performed and compared with the results of other traditional techniques to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that the approach is better than traditional methods. It not only considers the actual hydraulic information of the water distribution network, but also the important user nodes after an earthquake, and is of great significance for emergency command and rescue and disaster relief after an earthquake in the city.

It is necessary to evaluate the reliability of the water supply network, when the water supply network is damaged by an earthquake. Therefore, this paper researched the feasibility and characteristics of the surplus power entropy as the reliability index of the water supply network, and established a scheme framework for optimizing and improving the reliability of the water supply network. This paper developed a reliability evaluation model for the water supply network after an earthquake. Combined with the Monte Carlo stochastic simulation hydraulic analysis, this model is also based on the pressure-driven nodes water demand model. In the case study, the surplus power entropy method was applied to test the reliability of the model. The statistical curves of the surplus power entropy of nodes and pipe networks, the distribution of the surplus power entropy with different intensities in pipe networks, and the comparison results of three reliability improvement schemes, before and after, were obtained. The influence factors of the surplus power entropy were obtained from the data analysis. The high consistency between the surplus power entropy and flow entropy verifies the feasibility of the surplus power entropy as a reliability index. The three schemes show that the surplus power entropy index can be used as a beneficial supplement to the reliability evaluation index of the pipe network.