Optimized design and rehabilitation for water distribution systems
Enter your hydraulic constraints, allowable pipe sizes, and associated unit costs and let Darwin Designer evaluate hundreds of thousands of design and rehabilitation strategies for your water distribution system.
Forget about time-consuming, trial-and-error processes and rely on a robust optimization engine (genetic algorithm) to find solutions that maximize the hydraulic performance of your system, and minimize capital investment in a fraction of the time.
Darwin Designer is one of the available efficiency and optimization modules for WaterCAD and it is included with WaterGEMS.
Features and Benefits of Purchasing Darwin Designer
Interface and organization
| The all-in-one integrated Darwin Designer module lets you choose to run automatic design using a genetic algorithm or manual design where you apply specific solutions alternatives for trial-and-error calculations.
You can also maintain a traceable record of design runs performed on the model so that other users can quickly identify the steps that were taken and continue work in the shortest amount of time.
One or several design runs can be included in the different design studies you would have created for each design project in the design manager. |
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Design Study
All Darwin Designer data exists within design studies. A design study includes the following elements:
- A description of the events that serve as the basis for design where you need to choose the representative scenario
- A set of pipes being sized or rehabilitated
- Constraints you must meet: set demand adjustments, pressure and/or flow constraints, and boundary conditions
- A range of design sizes or rehabilitation options with corresponding cost
- Genetic algorithm options
- A number of design runs to test the design
- The results of design runs
You can create as many design study as you have design projects for your water system. |
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Design Objective Type
Set the overall priority of the design by choosing one of the three available design objectives:
- Minimize Cost sets price as your primary concern. The optimum solution will be the cheapest feasible one within your specified pressure and flow constraints.
- Maximize Benefits sets the performance of the system (measured by the pressures at specified junctions) as the highest priority. The optimum solution will be kept under your specified available budget.
- Multi-Objective Trade-Off lets the genetic algorithm consider where the best compromise lies between the cost and pressure benefits.
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Output
| After computing your design runs, review the optimized solutions calculated by Darwin Designer in the results area.
You can generate reports for solutions comparison, design and rehab group results, and pressure and flow constraints results.
For quicker understanding of your results, you can also generate two types of graph:
- Pareto optimal plot, which shows benefit versus cost for your calculations.
- Pipe size usage plot, which shows the total length of pipe of a certain diameter used by the solution.
Once the optimized feasible solution chosen, export your design results back to the base model as either a new scenario, or new model alternatives. |
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White Papers
Genetic Algorithm Plays a Role in Municipal Water Systems Zheng Wu, Ph.D, advisory software engineer for Bentley. As featured in the SIGEVOlution newsletter, the ACM special interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation.
What you need to know to Install Darwin Designer
Prerequisite: A WaterCAD or WaterGEMS license is required to run Darwin Designer.
Processor: Pentium III at 1 GHz (Recommended: Pentium 4 at 1.2 Ghz)
Operating System: Windows 2000 & Windows XP
Memory: 128 MB (256 MB recommended)
Hard Disk: 250 MB of free storage space, with additional room for data files
Display: 800 x 600 resolution, 256 colors