You are here:
MODEL FOR INSTANTANEOUS RESIDENTIAL WATER DEMANDS
Citation:
Buchberger, S. AND L. Wu. MODEL FOR INSTANTANEOUS RESIDENTIAL WATER DEMANDS. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/J-95/491, 1995.
Description:
Residential water use is visualized as a customer-server interaction often encountered in queuing theory. ndividual customers are assumed to arrive according to a nonhomogeneous Poisson process, then engage water servers for random lengths of time. usy servers are assumed to draw water at steady but random rates from the distribution system. hese conditions give rise to a time-dependent Markovian queuing system having servers that deliver random rectangular pulses of water. xpressions are derived for the mean, variance, and probability distribution of the flow rate and the corresponding pipe Reynolds number at points along a dead-end trunk line. omparison against computer-simulated results shows that the queuing model provides an excellent description of the temporal and spatial variations of the flow regime through a dead-end trunk line supplying water to a block of heterogeneous homes. he behavior of the local flow field given by the queuing model can be coupled with water-quality models that require ultrafine temporal and spatial resolutions to predict the fate of contaminants moving through municipal distribution systems.