Threat management decisions in the event of contamination of a waterdistribution system must be tailored to protect public health, maintain fire-fightingflows and flows to critical care facilities, and avoid inciting panic due to false alarms.Threat management strategies may be composed as a set of rules for taking actions tomitigate the situation and protect public health, such as flushing the water distributionsystem by opening fire hydrants or inducing demands, isolating portions of thesystem using control valves, and broadcasting boil water orders. These strategiesmust be robust to control contamination events that vary in time of injection,duration, and mass flow profiles, as well as to avoid false alarms. The developmentof threat management strategies can be improved through the use of a simulationoptimizationframework that simulates the complex interactions between managers'operation decisions, consumers' water consumption choices and the response of thehydraulics and contaminant transport in the water distribution system throughmechanistic and dynamic methods enabled by agent-based models. Heuristicoptimization methods are coupled within the dynamic system simulation frameworkto allow identification of efficient threat management strategies to achieve publichealth protection and maintain acceptable service. These methods will be exploredfor an illustrative case study to identify strategies to achieve these objectives.
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