Investigating Effectiveness of Sensor Placement Strategies in Contamination Detection within Water Distribution Systems

Water quality sensors placed in water distribution systems (WDSs) are critical for detecting accidental or intentional contamination intrusion. This motivates research to optimally place a limited number of sensors for a given WDS aimed to maximize the detection effectiveness (e.g., the detection likelihood and time to detection). Typically, effectiveness of a sensor placement strategy (SPS) is assessed using the expected impact across a number of contamination scenarios. Despite the value of such an approach, it may provide limited information on the SPS’s comprehensive properties in detection, such as the SPS’s ability to detect events with different levels of consequences, or to reduce the impacts from undetectable events. To address this limitation, this study investigates the underlying characteristics of the SPS’s effectiveness for contamination detection using a set of metrics focusing on detection time, consumption of contaminated water, the number of contaminated demand nodes, and the contaminated spatial distance. The former two are derived from detectable contamination scenarios and the latter two are computed from both detectable and undetectable contamination scenarios. The proposed method is illustrated for two real-world WDSs, and the results reveal the underlying properties of the SPS’s utility in contamination detection, which is significantly more informative than the measure of expected impacts. Such improved understanding provides guidance for selecting the most appropriate SPS and for improving preparedness for contamination events.