Judicious generation of alternative water network designs with manual evolution strategy

► The existence of alternative configurations can almost always be attributed to source shifts. ► The minimum number of interconnections in an optimal water network can be approximately predicted on the basis of graph theory. ► The proposed shift guidelines have been proven to be effective and more general than the available ones. ► The number of all alternative optimal configurations of water network can be targeted and all solutions can be generated by our proposed evolution procedure.