Looking for order in the maze of urban water and wastewater pipeline networks

Abstract

Active research has been going on to validate the Power Law in physics, economics, linguistics, sociology, geophysics etc. This paper sets out to test the hypothesis that the Power Law is a feature of water and wastewater pipeline networks in cities. Databases from 30 different municipalities in Norway serve as the raw data to be processed. The findings may seem a bit intuitive in retrospect, but the numerical results provide some interesting insights. There is greater conformity to the Power Law when the number of pipelines in different lengthclasses is taken into account, as compared to when the total length in each length-class is considered. By considering only the equations with a high degree or conformity to the Power Law, it is possible to derive a standard equation representing an average saturated Norwegian water-wastewater pipeline network. The authors recommend similar analyses of networks in other parts of the world.