Steady-State Hydraulic Analysis Based on Cellular Automata Using a Parallel Paradigm

Analysis of water distribution networks (WDNs) is considered to be indispensable for water supply design. Over the last decades, several methods have been developed to formulate and solve the steady-state hydraulic analysis of WDNs. For large WDNs, modeling the networks is complex and takes a great deal of time, and using the traditional methods becomes practically inefficient. This paper presents a parallel paradigm based on cellular automata to accelerate the hydraulic analysis of WDNs. The structure of the computing system is generated according to the structure of the WDN using the concept of cellular automata. Two methods are proposed for solving the hydraulic models. The performance of the proposed approach was compared with that of EPANET 2.0 software for networks with different complexity and topologies. The results indicate that, despite requiring more iterations to converge, the proposed parallel algorithm can accelerate the hydraulic analysis as much as 105 times using the proposed methods.