Closure to 'Optimal Design of Redundant Water Distribution Networks Using a Cluster of Workstations' by Sujay V. Kumar, Troy A. Doby, John W. Baugh Jr., E. Downey Brill, and S. Ranji Ranjithan

摘要

The authors thank the discussers for their thoughtful attention to this important problem. Their observation about the importance of network topology is one we endorse strongly, observing that we simply started with existing topologies to illustrate a method which could be used in an iterative design approach to explore different topologies. We also agree that Level 1 redundancy is most important for many practical applications, but our method can be extended and may be applicable to certain cases, such as designs for high-value, earthquake-prone areas.rnRegarding the related issues of optimal objective function value and feasibility, we cannot explain the differences without running the data set we used and the one used by the discussers on the same analysis program. These issues have been noted before regarding different solutions for the Hanoi problem in the literature (Savic and Walters 1997, p. 74). For our results, the solutions were feasible, and most important, they allowed consistent results that we used to illustrate our new approach and a tradeoff between cost and redundancy.