Interior point methods specialized to optimal pump operation costs of water distribution networks

In the water distribution problem the loss is important and the objective function must consider it combined with pump costs. The problem becomes complex because the loss in each branch is as a nonlinear function of water outflow. The objective of this work consists in solving the water distribution problem using interior point methods and to exploit the particular structure of the problem and the specific matrix sparse pattern of the of the resulting linear systems. The interior point methods show to be robust, achieving fast convergence in all instances tested. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)