A Surrogate Measure for Multi-Component Failure Based Reliability Analysis of Water Distribution Systems☆

Abstract Multi-component failure based reliability analysis of a real-life water distribution system (WDS) is extremely time consuming and computationally demanding. Reliability surrogate measures are novel techniques to lessen the associated computational burden in estimating the reliability of a WDS. Results of this study reveal that flow entropy of a WDS has stronger correlation with higher states of reliability rather than lower states. Consequently, statistical flow entropy is a better surrogate measure for multi-component failure based reliability of a WDS.