Abstract

Water distribution networks were included in the catalogue of critical infrastructures by different institutions as the European Council. One of the vulnerabilities of a water distribution networks consists of the contamination due to accidental or provoked events. Therefore, it is increasingly common to develop water quality models which allow the study of these threats. Many hydraulic models use algorithms with a high computational cost. Therefore, any strategy to accelerate these algorithms is an important contribution to the problem. This paper proposes a method to simplify branched areas of the network without losing information regarding water quality. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.