A Simplified Sanitary Sewer System Generator for Exploratory Modelling at City-Scale

Area of Science:

• Environmental Engineering
• Urban Planning
• Computational Modeling

Background:

• Wastewater infrastructure faces future challenges from climate change, population growth, and urbanization.
• Exploratory modeling is crucial for assessing infrastructure impacts and adaptation strategies.
• Existing models often struggle to balance realism with computational efficiency for large-scale strategy exploration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a spatially explicit algorithm for creating realistic yet computationally efficient sanitary sewer networks.
• To identify an optimal trade-off between model fidelity and computational performance for exploratory modeling.
• To provide a tool for long-term planning of wastewater infrastructure adaptation.

Main Methods:

• Abstraction of urban characteristics into a grid of 'Blocks' for sewer network topology delineation.
• Comparison of three pipe dimensioning approaches to find an efficient balance.
• Hydraulic performance assessment of the generated simplified sewer network.

Main Results:

• A spatially explicit algorithm generates sewer networks with realistic characteristics.
• A 250m Block size with a sequential Pipe-by-Pipe (PBP) design algorithm offers a sound trade-off.
• The PBP approach generates simplified networks in seconds, significantly reducing computational time for hydraulic simulations.

Conclusions:

• The developed model provides a computationally efficient and high-fidelity wastewater sewer network suitable for exploratory modeling.
• This method significantly reduces simulation time compared to detailed or highly abstract models.
• The model serves as a foundation for sophisticated analysis of sewer system adaptation measures.