Community detection as a tool for complex pipe network clustering

Among the possible strategies for the detection of water losses from water distribution networks, modern guidelines suggest a division of the network into clusters or district metered areas (DMAs). The measurement of incoming/outgoing flows for each DMA allows for a quantification of water losses. In this paper, the community detection approach developed in the complex network theory is applied in order to identify DMAs in a water distribution system. The adopted method is a modification of a previous algorithm, and it is aimed to find a compromise between the maximization of modularity and the reduction of the number of communities. Even for large systems (thousands of nodes and pipes), the proposed method is able to identify DMAs in a straightforward way with a very low amount of computational time.