The Identification of Loops in Water Distribution Networks

This paper presents an automatic algorithm for the identification of the minimum loops in a multi-source looped water distribution network. This algorithm, obtained as a generalization of that recently proposed by Creaco and Franchini (2014), has the novelty of being able to identify, automatically and in a single run, both the geometric and the fictitious loops of the network. Applications prove that the algorithm has acceptable computation times and can then be profitably adopted in the context of water distribution system analysis.