A novel cellular automata based approach to storm sewer design

Optimal storm sewer design aims at minimizing capital investment on infrastructure whilst ensuring good system performance under specified design criteria. An innovative sewer design approach based on cellular automata (CA) principles is introduced in this paper. Cellular automata have been applied as computational simulation devices in various scientific fields. However, some recent research has indicated that CA can also be a viable and efficient optimization engine. This engine is heuristic and largely relies on the key properties of CA: locality, homogeneity, and parallelism. In the proposed approach, the CA-based optimizer is combined with a sewer hydraulic simulator, the EPA Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). At each optimization step, according to a set of transition rules, the optimizer updates all decision variables simultaneously based on the hydraulic situation within each neighbourhood. Two sewer networks (one small artificial network and one large real network) have been tested in this study. The CA optimizer demonstrated its ability to obtain near-optimal solutions in a remarkably small number of computational steps in a comparison of its performance with that of a genetic algorithm.