Nitish Kumar Dumoliya, a research fellow at IEOR, IIT Bombay, presented his work titled "Heuristics for Optimizing Water Distribution Networks" co-authored with Prof Ashutosh Mahajan at the 57th Operational Research Society of India (ORSI - 2024) conference held at the IIT Bombay, India from 12th Dec to 14th Dec 2024.
Water distribution network optimization involves the design of a reliable, efficient, and cost-effective distribution network that fulfills the necessary water demands of users while maintaining the minimum pressure requirements. Selecting the optimal size of pipes in a network is an important activity in designing and upgrading such systems. The design of water distribution networks is challenging because of the nonlinear and non-convex nature of the pressure difference constraints and categorizing the optimization problem in the class non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programs (non-convex MINLPs). We are developing a heuristic approach based on the acyclic flows in the water network. We test the heuristics on a collection of benchmark instances and compare the performance to the nonlinear solvers Baron, Knitro, Bonmin and Minotaur.