400
Application of Genetic Algorithms to Pump Scheduling for Water Supply
Gunther MacMe Dragan A. Savic
University of Exeter
U.K.
Abstract
A Simple Genetic Algorithm has been applied
to the scheduling of multiple pumping units in
a water supply system with the objective of
minimising the overall cost of the pumping
operation, taking advantage of storage capac-
ity in the system and the availability of off-
peak electricity tariffs. A simple example
shows that the method is easy to apply and has
produced encouraging preliminary results.
1 htroduction
Pump Scheduling
Due to increased levels of urbanisation and
consumer demand, most water distribution
systems have become increasingly complex
and so too has the task of efficient scheduling
of pump operation. Theoretical studies and
practical implementation of optimal pump
scheduling in various types of supply system
suggest that 10%of the annual expenditure on
energy and related costs may be saved [l]if
proper optimisation methods are used. A sys-
tematic approach to the subject is therefore
highly desirable.
Pump scheduling is the process of choosing
which of the available pumps within a water
supply system are to be used and for which
periods of the day the pumps are to be run.
The aim of pump scheduling is to minimise
the marginal cost of supplying water, whilst
keeping within physical and operational con-
straints, such as maintaining sufficient water
within the system’s reservoirs to meet the re-
quired time varying consumer demands.
Important features of cost are the electricity
tariff structure, the relative efficiencies of the
available pump sets, the head through which
they pump and marginal treatment costs. Im-
portant constraints include consumer demand,
Genetic Algorithms in Engineering Systems: Innovations and Applications
12-14 September 1995, Conference Publication No. 414,O IEE, 1995
Gsdfrey A Waltess
reservoir capacities, abstraction limits,
pumping capacity and treatment works
throughput.
Optimisation Methods
There are several types of optimisation meth-
ods which have been used to find optimal
pump schedules when, because of complex
water distribution systems, simple calculations
are no longer possible. The main methods
used at present are linear programming, dy-
namic programming, network flow program-
ming and non-linear programming. Details of
these methods are given in [l].
None of these methods is totally satisfactory
for all types of pump scheduling problem, and
so there cannot be general advice given as to
which method is best to use. They all have one
common problem, namely that they work well
for small systems but they encounter difficul-
ties when dealing with larger ones. For ex-
ample they may become inadequate when
there are more than two reservoirs in the sys-
tem or even for one-reservoir systems which
have several different pump combinations or
complicated system constraints. The amount
of necessary calculation increases so rapidly
with the number of reservoirs and possible
pump combinations that the computing re-
quirements become unacceptable.
This paper presents an attempt to solve the
aforementioned optimisation problem by using
Genetic Algorithms (GAS). GAS treat discrete
values used in pump scheduling models natu-
rally and thus they seem well suited to this
kind of optimisation.
A description of standard genetic algorithms
can be found in [2,3]. The paper now goes on
to describe the application of genetic algo-
rithms to pump scheduling and to discuss the
possibilities of improving their performance.
 40 1
2 Pump Scheduling Model
First, some facts about modelling the supply
system must be mentioned. It is normi~llysuf-
ficient to consider scheduling over a one day
period, taking the historic demand paltern for
an average day as the predicted requirement.
Pumps can supply water from one or more
sources to one or more reservoirs, from which
the demands are drawn. For continuity, the
reservoirs must finish their daily cyclie at the
same level from which they started. ‘The day
has to be divided up into time intervals, during
which each pump can either be switched on or
not. The pump schedule derived will specify
the time intervals for which each pump has to
be switched on. Only fixed speed pumps are
considered in this study. For all possible pump
combinations, the pump efficiencies and
head/flow characteristics have to be defined.
Furthermore the usable reservoir capacities
have to be determined, and maximum and
minimum levels set.
The next step is to define the cost fiinction,
which has to include all the essential expendi-
ture caused by the pumping process. The main
component will be the cost of electricity but
other costs such as special charges for peak
monthly electrical demand or a maintenance
charge dependent on the number of pump
switches made, can be included.
To ensure that the system constraints are not
violated in the solution, it is necessary to in-
troduce penalty functions for unfulfililed de-
mand, violation of reservoir capacity, etc. To
define suitable values for the penalties is an
important task in order to make the search in
the solution space as efficient as possible. Too
small a penalty will make it likely that a large
part of the search is performed outside the real
solution space and too high a penalty can
make it difficult for the genetic algorithm to
find the optimal solution if it is near or even
on a boundary introduced by the system con-
straints.
The cost function, now including all h e dif-
ferent cost components and constraint viola-
tion penalties is generally non-linear aind non-
differentiable. It depends on several ldiscrete
valued variables and so the task of optimka-
tion is computationally difficult. An attempt to
apply genetic algorithms to this optinnisation
problem is detailed in the next section.
3 Genetic . A l g o ~for
~ t]Pump
~ ~ Scheduling
Initially a standard GA was adopted contain-
ing:
0 a fitness function which calculates the
fitnesses of the population members di-
rectly from their costs
e the genetic operators
* one-, two-, or multiple point cross-
over
4 mutation
* an ellitist strategy
This GA works but performs relatively ineffi-
ciently, as the calculation times even for small
systems are quite long with a lot of genera-
tions needed to find optimal solutions. Some
improvement can lbe achieved by tailoring the
optimization paraimeters such as population
size, probability of mutation and crossover to
the specific grobllem. The most significant
improvement, however, comes from the intro-
duction of a ranking function for the members
for calculating their relative fitnesses, as de-
scribed litter in the paper.
For pump scheduling, the use of a standard
binary coding is the obvious choice, since each
binary value can represent one pump that is
either on or off during a particular time inter-
val. The use of other forms of coding were
considered to have no advantages for this type
of problem.
Ranking of the Population
In the standard GA the fitness of each member
is calculaited as an inverse function of the cost.
The relative fitness and prolbability of being a
parent are then derived. The relative fitness
can, however, cause difficulties. If the fit-
nesses axe quite similar there will not be a
proper selection between good and less good
solutions, but if, on the other hand, the rela-
tive fitnesses of a very few members are too
high ciornpared to the others, this will soon
lead to a lack of diversity in the population.
For this application, the problem was solved
by introducing a ranking procedure [4]. The
population members are ranked in order ac-
cording to their costs. Each then receives a
fitness dependent on its position within the
ordered list. For simplicity, a fitness equal to
the order number is used, tlhe most expensive
solution getting a fitness of 1, the next 2 etc.
 402

The introduction of the ranking function leads
to a remarkable increase of the efficiency of
the genetic algorithm. The extra computing
time needed each generation to sort the popu-
lation, (using a heap sort algorithm [SI), is
small compared to the time saved by finding
the optimal or near optimal solu!ion in a
greatly reduced number of generations. Fur-
thermore the ranking function makes the ge-
netic algorithm more robust against factors
such as inappropriate sizing of penalty func-
tions.
4 Computational Considerations for an
Example System
The example used for demonstration of the
method is a simple system with 4 different
pumps delivering water to a single reservoir.
Consequently there are 16 different possible
pump combinations. The day was divided up
into 24 time intervals, each of one hour, with
the demand drawn from the reservoir chang-
ing for each hour. The difference between the
rate at which water is pumped to the reservoir
and the demand is accommodated by changes
in the volume of water stored in the reservoir,
subject to maximum and minimum storage
volumes. To represent the 16 different pump
combinations, a binary string of length 4 is
required, and as there are 24 time intervals the
length of the complete binary string for the
solution space is 24 x 4 = 96. With this binary
string all the 296 (8x1QZ8)theoretically possi-
ble pump schedules are represented. A1 the
important data about the pump c o ~ b i ~ a ~ ~ o n s
their efficiencies and the influence of the
pump head are precalculated and summarised
in Table 1. The binary coding is also defined
there, 1 meaning switched on and zero
switched off.
Cost function
The main cost is for the energy to pump the
water into the reservoirs. The amount of elec-
tricity consumed by each pQmp combination,
which is shown in table 1 has to be multiplied
by the unit costs for electricity. It is assumed
that the night-time tariff is 7 money-units per
electricity-unit and that the day-time tariff is
double that price. The higher daytime tariff
has to be paid from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. It is
easy to include other types of cost like previ-
ously mentioned maintenance costs which
may depend on the number of times per day
that pumps are switched, or any other costs
e.g. different costs for taking the water from
different sources. However, to include a
monthly peak demand electricity tariff, as re-
quired for some systems, makes it necessary to
extend the optimisation period from one day to
one month. In this case the demand prediction

0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 10 12
0 0 1 0 30 30
0 0 1 1 40 42

0 1 0 0 50 44
0 1 0 1 60 56
0 1 1 0 80 74
0 1 1 1 90 86

1 0 0 0 100 80
1 0 0 1 110 92
1 0 1 0 130 111
1 0 1 1 140 124

1 1 0 0 150 127
1 1 0 1 160 141
1 1 1 0 180 165
1 1 1 1 190 182

Table 1 : Pump Combinations


becomes a very difficult task, becaust: it is no
longer possible to take an average daiy as the
only basis for the cost calculation: in addition
it is necessary to consider the wcirst day,
which is far less predictable.
As well as electricity charges, it is necessary to
include penalty functions for system constraint
27
26
25
24
23
’ 22
t
21
1 10
number of generations
Figure 1: Evolution of the optimum solution
violations in the cost function. These consist
of:
unfulfilled demand in each time interval
due to reservoir levels falling bellow the
specified minimum
maximum reservoir levels exceeded, due
to excess pumping
not regaining the initial reservoir level at
the end of the 24 hour cycle
With this cost function one can now evaluate
the costs for any possible pump schedule.
Optimisation process
The duty of the genetic algorithm is to find the
solution with the lowest cost which does not
violate any of the system constraints. The
evolution of the solutions through the genera-
tions of the genetic algorithm towardls the op-
timum is shown in Figure 1 for the average
population member (population size 2: 40) and
for the best member of each population. Note
that the x-axis is logarithmically scaled.
403
One can see that the optimal, or near optimal,
solution is found after about 10,000 genera-
tions. The cost progression of the average
member is in general ternas quite similar to
that of the best member. For this example the
cost of the average population member is, ex-
cept at the very beginning, about 5 % higher
than the current optimum. If this difference
100 1000 1 O0OCl 100000
was smaller, it would indicate a lack of di-
versity in the later generations. If it was too
big, the efficiency of the search would de-
crease as the search would1 be more or less
random. Fox this simple example, the time
taken on a 486DX SOMHz PC was about 20
minutes for 10,000 generations.
Results of the optimisatiion for the one-
reservoir system
The best solution shows, as expected, that as
much of the water as pcissible should be
pumped using the cheap night time tariff. As
shown in Figure 2, the reservoir is conse-
quently as full as possible at the end of the
cheap period and as empty as allowed at the
end of the expensive period. In Figure 3 one
can see the exact amount which has to be
pumped in each time interval in order to
achieve the optimum solution. To make the
influence of this pump schetlule on the reser-
voir level more visible the demand over the
day is also shown in Figure 3. Although the
volume pumped during the (day is not so dif-
 404
ferent from the volume pumped in the night,
there is a huge oscillation in the reservoir
level. If the reservoir were bigger, the volume
pumped during the day would decrease fur-
ther. However in this case, the most efficient
pump b u m p 1) is used nearly the whole day
so that the water level does not drop too far
towards the end of the expensive electricity
tariff period. The less efficient pumps are jus1
used during the night. It must be mentioned
that there are a number of equally good opti-
mal solutions, as the pumped volumes speci-
fied for some hours can be switched around
wi~hou~ affecting costs or vioiating con-
straints.
5 Conclusions and further ideas
The question of whether pump scheduling
optimisation with genetic algorithms is supe-
rior to the other optimisation methods men-
tioned in chapter one cannot be answered de-
finitively at this stage as no formal compari-
son has been made. However it is clear that
GAS and other evolutionary programming
800 t------
700
t
00
508
400
300
200
100
0 . . . .
0 2 4 6 8 10' 42' 44' 16' 18' 20' 22' 24
time (hours)
Figure 2: Stored volume vs. time
methods can offer a lot of new possibilities for
solving these problems, in particular by allow-
ing different constraints and cost factors to l
x On-line Control
considered more easily than with other meth-
ods.
Simulation of changes to the system
Apart from the direct advantage of savings in
energy costs, the availability of an easy to use
optimal pump scheduling package enables
changes in the system to be simulated and
examined for efficiency. Critical hardware
compofients can be identified, such as the
most frequently used pumps or the reservoirs
that are used for their maximum capacity
ranges. The effect of modifying these compo-
nents, such as replacing a pump with a more
efficient unit or enlarging a reservoir can tie
examined in a systematic manner to maximise
benefit. A GA based pump scheduling model
can easily cope with changes in the system
components, as the optimization routines are
largely independent of the structure of the
modelled system.
Similarly, if the supply network is to be ex-
tended to meet the demands of new housing or
industrial development, the GA approach is
flexible enough to cope with the system
changes, and to help in the identification of
the optimum arrangement for the modified
system.
Although most pump schedules are fixed in
advance, with operators making adjustments
to the schedule as necessary to compensate for
differences between predicted and actual de-
 405

200

175

150

125

180

75

50

Figure 3: Hourly pumped volumes and demand

mands, it is likely that on-line control will
become increasingly implemented. One impor-
tant aspect of the GA approach currently being
investigated is the ability of the GA to adapt to
slightly changed constraint conditioils, e.g..
on-line changes in predicted demand ilnd CUT-
rent reservoir levels. Maintaining a family of
diverse yet near optimal solutions as a starting
point for the evolution may allow rapid iden-
tification of the optimum schedule suilable for
on-line control.
6 References
2. Michalewicz, Z., Genetic Algorithms +
Data Structures = Evollution Programs.
Springen Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1992.
3. Goldberg, D.E., Genelic Algorithms in
Searchi, Optimization and Machine Learning.
Addison-Wesley, 1989.
4.Baker, J.E., Adaptive selection methods for
genetic algorithms, in J.J. Grefenstette (ed.),
Pmceeding of an international conference on
Genetic Algorithms, pp. 101-111, Lawrence
Earlbaurn, 1985.

1. Water Research Centre, Pump Scheduling 5. Press, W.H., Teukolsky, S.A., Vetterling,
in Water Supply, Report TR232, Swindon, W.T., Flannery, B.P. Numerical Recipes in C:
UK, 1985. the art of scientific comlputing. University
Press, Cambridge, 1992.