Investigating a diversified and decentralized water distribution system to enhance water supply resilience to disruptive events

Conventional water infrastructure, particularly with a centralized water resources and supply systems, has provided reliable water services. However, recent water crises, such as the severe droughts in Texas and California in 2022 and the water outage in Jackson, Mississippi from a pump failure in the city’s water treatment plant, highlight the challenges of dealing with extreme and uncertain disruptions. To address the uncertainties, various systems in the fields of computer networking, ecosystems, financial asset management, and armed forces have employed diversification and decentralization strategies. In this context, this study presents the configuration and operation of water distribution system (WDS) composed of decentralized sub-networks including diverse water sources (e.g., rainwater and reclaimed water) as a resilient water system. First, this study built a lab-scale physical model of a diversified and decentralized WDN and demonstrated its operational and physical failures under various disruption scenarios (e.g., intentional pump-shutoff and pipe leakage). Then, using a quantifiable resilience measure, the resilience of the diversified and decentralized WDN was compared with that of a centralized WDN (a single water source) in its configuration and operation. The results showed that the diversified and decentralized WDN has the higher resilience effects than the traditional WDNs and discussed the practical implementation of the diversified and decentralized WDN to improve the resilience of current water infrastructure systems. The findings will provide engineering insights into how the diversification and decentralization strategies are incorporated into the current water systems to deal with uncertain and extreme disruptions with resilience.