Optimizing pump operation scheduling for water supply systems

We develop a new method to plan pump operation schedules for water supply systems. In the method, we define a solution space as a network model in which the nodes are cumulative flow rates and the edges are the flow rates at each time step. We treat pump scheduling as a shortest path problem, and the A* search algorithm is used to find the optimum path. One feature of the proposed method is that the search area is restricted by constraints, such as the water level of tanks. We examine this scheduling method by attempting to solve a benchmark problem and evaluated the accuracy and the computing time. The experimental results show that the method can make suitable solutions within an acceptable waiting time. We confirmed that the proposed method can be used effectively for large-scale water supply systems.