Uma metaheurística iterated local search baseada em simulação para o escalonamento de bombas hidráulicas em redes de distribuição de água.

Abstract

In a water distribution network, the electricity amount to operate the pumps can achieve 90% of the total electricity consumed. The amount charged for electricity consumption can differ at each time of the day. Therefore, scheduling the pump’s operation at opportune times can reduce energy costs. Optimal or near-optimal pump scheduling is not trivial given the nonlinear constraints of the WDN, which include the pump scheduling problem in the NP-hard class. The pump scheduling problem consists of obtaining the lowest operating monetary cost, guaranteeing that water is delivered to all demand points, and without violating the physical constraints of the water distribution network. This work proposes heuristic methods based on simulations, combining them in an Iterated Local Search (ILS) metaheuristic. Computational experiments show that the proposed approach is promissory, obtaining the best results using the binary representation with the restrictions presented in this work, and when compared to other pump scheduling representations, the values obtained for the Vanzyl instance reached solutions that deviate by only 0.73% of the best-known value and at only 2.02% value for Richmond.