Challenges and Opportunities for Synthetic Water Distribution Models

Abstract Amidst increasing need for efficiency gains and protection against vulnerabilities, the expression of infrastructure as digital twins is increasingly important to assess disruptions and planning. Water distribution networks (WDN) are one such infrastructure facing an increasing need for modernization and resilience. However, the dearth of high-resolution data on WDNs prevents robust simulations. This study explores the challenges and opportunities of synthetic water distribution models as a critical bridge to navigate the complexities of urban water networks. A synthetic infrastructure model is applied to San Juan and Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to generate synthetic WDNs composed of reservoirs, pumps, links, and nodes, using the road network as a proxy for pipe location. The synthetic networks are then compared with true data from the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority to assess their ability to reproduce key structural and hydraulic characteristics. Results show that the synthetic networks effectively capture large-scale network connectivity and spatial patterns, with moderate to strong correlations in pipe placement, nodal allocation, and pressure profiles. Challenges are apparent in synthesizing across urban and rural morphologies, with the synthetic models overestimating nodal density in rural areas while underestimating it in urban cores. Pipe diameter distributions also diverge, with synthetic models favoring smaller pipes, impacting redundancy and criticality assessments. Opportunities to improve synthetic models include integrating population-density based allocation strategies to influence looped versus branched structure, improved handling of reservoir connections, and refining hydraulic parameters to enhance realism. These findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic water distribution models as scalable tools for resilience analysis in data-scarce regions while highlighting strategies to improve the representation of sociotechnical complexities and hydraulic dynamics.