Multimodal optimization problem in contamination source determination of water supply networks

Abstract It makes great economic losses and bad social influence for our country about some accidental drinking water contamination and vicious attacks to water distribution networks. In terms of solving the problems of drinking water contamination caused by accidental contaminant event in water supply network, used the techniques just like sensor network which could determinate the source location to isolate the contaminated area and minimized its hazards. Previous studies have shown that the contamination source determination problem model can be utilized to convert the contamination source determination problem to an unimodal function optimization problem. However, we notice that it is a multimodal function optimization problem in essence and the number of its solution has non-uniqueness feature. In this paper, we first modified the problem model with formulate the threshold value based on the previous works and proposed the niching genetic algorithm calculate multiple contamination sources, and provide the possibility for screening the true contamination source. Furthermore, this paper applies different distribution networks verify the validity after the threshold formulation as well as the effectiveness of algorithm from various aspects.