Armando Di Nardo

Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli · Dipartimento di Ingegneria

Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) must keep a proper level of service under a wide range of operational conditions, and, in particular, the analysis of their resilience to pipe failures is essential to improve their design and management. WDNs can be regarded as large sparse planar graphs showing fractal and complex network properties. In this pap...

The management of existing water supply networks can be substantially improved by permanent water district metering (WDM) which is one of the most efficient techniques for water loss detection and pressure management. However, WDM may compromise water system performance, since some pipes are usually closed to delimit districts in order not to have...

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) represents the application of the “divide and conquer” paradigm to a Smart WAter Network (SWAN) that allows the improved application of techniques for water balance and pressure control. Indeed, these techniques can be applied with greater effectiveness by defining smaller permanent network parts, called District Me...

This paper proposes a new methodology for the optimal design of water network sectorization, which is an essential technique for improving the management and security of multiple-source water supply systems. In particular, the network sectorization problem under consideration concerns the definition of isolated district meter areas, each of which i...

Water distribution networks play a crucial role in delivering safe water to communities. However, their extensive reach and complex structure make them susceptible to contamination. The development of efficient contamination warning systems (CWSs) can enable the monitoring and control of abnormal events. In an efficient CWS, several key aspects mus...

This paper proposes a new multi-step approach for sensitivity assessment of surface runoff parameters. The procedure has been tested on a peri-urban basin in southern Italy, interested by intense urbanization. The basin has limited data about land characteristics, and nearby precipitation measurements are not available. Accordingly, rainfall events...

The effect of climate change on the Mediterranean landscape requires environmental restoration projects based on interdisciplinary research methods that consider the integration of different evolving aspects mainly in urban contexts where the increase of severe rainfalls is significantly impacting citizen behaviour. Starting from a case study of St...

The management of an Urban Drainage System (UDS) is a complex task, as it requires extensive knowledge about precipitation regime, hydrological features of the catchment, hydraulic characteristics of the drainage network, and information about the water use by the served inhabitants. Complex semi-distributed hydrological and physically based hydrau...

This paper presents the head-drop method for the modeling of pressure regulation devices in the steady-state simulation of water distribution networks (WDNs). The method is based on addition of device-associated head drops to the source term of pipe energy-balance equations. Head drops and device statuses (active, open, and closed) are updated duri...

Industry is an integral part of the economic activity of any country [...]

Water systems represent critical, complex, dynamic human-environment coupled systems, whose management transcends individual scientific disciplines. The water system faces a plethora of old and new challenges. As reported in many scientific and technical papers, greater coordination between academia, industry, decision and policy-makers is needed t...

Water distribution systems (WDSs) are considered inherently vulnerable to intentional and accidental contamination. The installation of a water quality sensor system (WQSS) represents a valid strategy for securing WDSs against contamination. This paper proposes a novel topological-based methodological approach for defining a suitable WQSS, by also...

Entropy and resilience metrics are proposed as indices to measure the robustness of water distribution networks (WDN) regarding pipe failures and permanent district metering areas (DMAs). Whereas pipe failures represent a temporary disruption of some pipes of WDN (i.e., pipe restoration or replacement), the creation of DMAs involves a permanent alt...

Design and management of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) have been, so far, mainly based only on complying a fixed dilution rate of wastewater in stormwater during rain events. This poses serious environmental issues, since the definition of the acceptable dilution does not consider the characteristics of the upstream urban catchment, nor the clima...

Globalization, climate changes, innovative technologies and new human habits have increased attention to water conservation and management. Therefore, behavioural studies became a key element to understand how and when water is used in residential environment. Water End USE Dataset and TOols (WEUSEDTO), an open water end use consumption dataset and...

This paper deals with the issue of the consistency of water distribution network (WDN) modelling concerning the nature of demand for the optimal water quality sensor placement. In this regard, a bi-objective optimization for the sensor placement is carried out by minimizing the contamination extension or the contaminated population in the trade-off...

This paper presents the comparison of second and third order algorithms for steady state resolution of water distribution networks (WDNs). The algorithms are obtained by using the direct outflow/pressure relationship and linearizing the global equations using the Newton Raphson method. The increase in the order of convergence from quadratic to cubi...

Knowledge of how water consumers' demand varies across different domestic end uses is key to designing water demand management strategies. Water usage statistics at the fixture level can be used, for example, to formulate tailored consumption-based feedback aimed at fostering water conservation and promoting more sustainable water consumption in th...

A suitable strategy for pressure sensor placement in water distribution systems allows water managers and engineers for better monitoring and controlling of the infrastructure. Sensor placement problem is often addressed by optimization techniques able to deal with its combinatorial nature. This paper focuses on such a question from the innovative...

Analytics can support numerous aspects of water industry planning, management, and operations. Given this wide range of touchpoints and applications, it is becoming increasingly imperative that the championship and capability of broad-based analytics needs to be developed and practically integrated to address the current and transitional challenges...

Analytics can support numerous aspects of water industry planning, management, and operations. Given this wide range of touchpoints and applications, it is becoming increasingly imperative that the championship and capability of broad-based analytics needs to be developed and practically integrated to address the current and transitional challenges...

Design and management of combined sewer overflows (CSO) have been, so far, mainly based only on complying a fixed dilution rate of wastewater in stormwater during rain events. This poses serious environmental issues since the definition of the acceptable dilution (i.e. overflows are usually designed for activation when Q >~5Q mw , the latter being...

This paper aims to solve three issues frequently present in the optimal placement of water quality sensors for protecting water distribution systems (WDSs) from both accidental and intentional contamination, namely i) computational intractability of the optimization problem as the size of the WDS increases, ii) unrealistic assumption that sensors a...

Water infrastructure systems management is one of the most urgent global issues, as urbanization and population continue to rise. Monitoring and analysis of water demand is one of many challenges faced by researchers in the past decades. The spread of smart technology improves the way in which data can be collected. Water utilities are starting to...

In the era of Smart Cities, in which the paradigms of smart water and smart grid are keywords of technological progress, advancements in metering systems allow for water consumption data collection at the end-use level, which is necessary to profile users' behaviors and to promote sustainable use of water resources. In this paper, a real case study...

This paper presents a novel algorithm with improved convergence and robustness for the pressure-driven modelling of water distribution networks (WDNs), to be implemented as hydraulic engine in the fourth release of the SWANP software. The innovative approach is based on increasing the order of convergence, which is quadratic for algorithms obtaine...

The positioning of quality detection points as well as the frequency of sampling is a crucial aspect for the implementation of Water Safety Plans (WSPs), which have been proposed worldwide to ensure water quality and to minimize the risk from contamination in water distribution networks (WDNs). In this regard, some international legislations and be...

Near real-time monitoring and control of critical infrastructure is essential for the operation and management of cities in a world that is, today, more complex and interconnected than ever. Such an infrastructure can be represented as complex networks an some of their related indices and statistics, many of them based on the shortest paths, play a...

Most real-world networks, from the World-Wide-Web to biological systems, are known to have common structural properties. A remarkable point is fractality, which suggests the self-similarity across scales of the network structure of these complex systems. Managing the computational complexity for detecting the self-similarity of big-sized systems re...

This Editorial presents the paper collection of the Special Issue (SI) on Smart UrbanWater Networks. The number and topics of the papers in the SI confirms the growinginterest of operators and researchers for the new paradigm of Smart Networks as part ofthe more general Smart City. The SI showed that digital information and communicationtechnology...

Over the last three decades, the increasing development of smart water meter trials and the rise of demand management has fostered the collection of water demand data at increasingly higher spatial and temporal resolutions. Counting these new datasets and more traditional aggregate water demand data, the literature is rich with heterogeneous urban...

The removal of groundwater contamination is a complex process due to the hydro-geochemical characteristics of the specific site, related maintenance and the possible presence of several types of pollutants, both organic and inorganic. In recent decades, there has been an increasing drive towards more sustainable treatment for contaminated groundwat...

This file contains the complete catalog of datasets and publications reviewed in: Di Mauro A., Cominola A., Castelletti A., Di Nardo A.. Urban Water Consumption at Multiple Spatial and Temporal Scales. A Review of Existing Datasets. Water 2021. The complete catalog contains: - 92 state-of-the-art water demand datasets identified at the district, h...

Pump-and-treat technology is among the most used technologies for groundwater remediation. While conventional, vertical wells (VRWs) are well-known and used from long time, horizontal wells (HRWs) have been explored for remediation technologies only in last few decades. HRWs have shown to outperform vertical wells in terms of versatility, productiv...

Current and future smart cities are moving towards the zero-net energy use concept. To this end, the built environment should also be designed for efficient energy use and play a significant role in the production of such energy. At present, this is achieved by focusing on energy demand in buildings and to the renewable trade-off related to smart p...

Water network partitioning (WNP) represents an efficient strategy to improve management of water distribution networks, reduce water losses and monitor water quality. It consists in physically dividing of a water distribution network (WDN) into districted metered areas (DMAs) through the placement of flow meters and isolation valves on boundary pip...

Disaggregation techniques are useful to separate data aggregated into single end-use categories, and they are becoming of great interest in the water sector due to the technological innovation in metering systems that has made water consumption data available. However, in order to apply disaggregation methods, high-resolution data at the end-use le...

The paper presents the results of the Battle of Postdisaster Response and Restoration (BPDRR) presented in a special session at the first International water distribution systems analysis & computing and control in the water industry (WDSA/CCWI) Joint Conference, held in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in July 2018. The BPDRR problem focused on how to r...

This paper proposes the modulation of nodal outflows in water distribution networks (WDNs) to solve the problem of low disinfectant concentrations at critical dead-end nodes, in which low flow velocities and long residence times cause excessive disinfectant decay. The slight increase in nodal outflows at these sites, which can be obtained through t...

Disaggregation techniques, useful to separate data aggregated into single end-use categories, are becoming of great interest in the water sector due to the technological innovation on metering systems that made available water consumption data. However, in order to apply disaggregation methods high-resolution data at end-use level are needed. To fa...

Permanent partitioning represents one of the more effective approaches for an innovative management of water distribution networks (WDNs) because it allows simplification of the network control defining small subsystem defined as a district meter area (DMA) in which it is simpler to compute water balance, to achieve pressure management and to check...

The optimal and sustainable management of water distribution systems still represent an arduous task. In many instances, especially in aging water net-works, pressure management is imperative for reducing breakages and leakages. Therefore, optimal District Metered Areas represent an effective solution to decreasing the overall energy input without...

Water temperature is often monitored at water sources and treatment works; however, there is limited monitoring of the water temperature in the drinking water distribution system (DWDS), despite a known impact on physical, chemical and microbial reactions which impact water quality. A key parameter influencing drinking water temperature is soil tem...

The detection of contaminant intrusion into a water-distribution network (WDN) is a difficult issue due to uncertainty related to the type of injected contaminant, source location, and intrusion time. The placement of water quality sensors has received increasing interest in the last years, and it still represents an open problem and a great challe...

Water distribution systems (WDSs) today are expected to continuously provide clean water while meeting users demand, and pressure requirements. To accomplish these targets is not an easy task due to extreme weather events, operative accidents and intentional attacks; as well as the progressive deterioration of the WDS assets. Therefore, water utili...

Flushing plans within a water distribution network (WDN) provide a tool for improving disinfectant residuals and removing stagnant water. The problem of low disinfectant residuals occurs in areas of a WDN such as dead-end nodes, in which low flow conditions and long residence times lead to excessive decay of the disinfectant upstream from users. He...

This paper proposes a general framework to adjust water distribution network (WDN) partitioning algorithms to account for the real positions of isolation valves. This framework can be applied following the identification of WDN segments (i.e., the smallest parts of the WDN that can be isolated without interrupting the service in the whole WDN) and...

The paper presents a hardware/software platform that integrates IoT technologies for deploying a smart water network in a domestic environment. Low cost sensors and edge nodes have been deployed in a real pilot for monitoring water fixture use. A data collection platform, which can run in the Fog or in Cloud, allows for processing of raw data and m...

Adsorptive wells arrays are an innovative outline of Permeable Reactive Barrier (PRBs) made of a definite number of passive deep wells opportunely distributed in the aquifer, known as PAB-D (Discontinuous Permeable Adsorptive Barrier). They are generally located downstream the contaminated groundwater flow and perpendicularly to the groundwater flo...

This paper proposes a combined management strategy for monitoring water distribution networks (WDNs). This strategy is based on the application of water network partitioning (WNP) for the creation of district metered areas (DMAs) and on the installation of sensors for water quality monitoring. The proposed methodology was tested on a real WDN, show...

This paper presents a novel methodology to automatically split a water distribution system (WDS) into self-adapting district metered areas (DMAs) of different size. Complex networks theory is used to propose a novel multiscale network layout made by landmark and key nodes for the water supply plus the hyper-links representing the connection between...

Effective landfill management and operation require an accurate evaluation of the occurrence and extent of odour emission events, which are among the main causes of resident complaints and concerns, in particular in densely urbanised areas. This paper proposes a fuzzy optimal protection system (FOPS) based on fuzzy logic to manage odour production...

This paper proposes a dimension reduction process for computing the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm in a complex network. This is done through a novel multiscale (MS) network decomposition into base-elements: links and landmark-nodes. All of them result to be essential for keeping all the network connectivity information and for speeding up the...

This paper proposes a dimension reduction process for computing the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm in a complex network. This is done through a novel multiscale (MS) network decomposition into base-elements: links and landmark-nodes. All of them result to be essential for keeping all the network connectivity information and for speeding up the...

The great amount of big data provided to the water utilities from the application of smart technologies represents a key role for the future of water analysis and management. Water big data (WBD) can offer various ways of employment to support water network analysis and to achieve a smart management of the system. In this regard, one of the main ap...

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) is among the most attractive and studied strategies for the improvement of the Water Distribution Network (WDN) management. The proper definition of sub-regions (called clusters or districts) with high link density between nodes in the same group, and a relatively low link density between nodes in different groups,...

This paper proposes a multiresolution methodology to visualise and analyse big complex networks. The approach is useful for sensor placement in water distribution systems. Traditional approaches such as CPLEX for facility location in networked structures and eigenvector centrality measures benefit from being addressed at various hierarchical levels...

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are among the most important civil networks, because they deliver drinking and industrial water to metropolitan areas, supporting economic prosperity and quality of life. Therefore, they constitute critical infrastructures (CIs) as systems whose operability are of crucial importance to ensure social survival and w...

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) is among the most attractive strategies for the improvement of Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) management. The choice of dividing large-scale networks into permanent smaller and manageable subsystems, called District Metered Areas (DMAs), offers precious advantages for the pressure management, the control of cons...

The following paper presents a method to optimise a discontinuous permeable adsorptive barrier (PAB-D). This method is based on the comparison of different PAB-D configurations obtained by changing some of the main PAB-D design parameters. In particular, the well diameters, the distance between two consecutive passive wells and the distance between...

Water network protection from accidental and intentional contamination is one of the most critical issues for preserving the citizen health. Recently, some techniques have been proposed in the literature to define the optimal sensor placement. On the other hand, through the definition of permanent DMAs (District Meter Areas), water network partitio...