Water utilities face a challenge in maintaining a good quality of
service under a wide range of operational management and failure conditions.
Tools for assessing the resilience of water distribution networks are therefore
essential for both operational and maintenance optimization. In this paper, a
novel graph-theoretic approach for the assessment of resilience for large scale
water distribution networks is presented. This is of great importance for the
management of large scale water distribution systems, most models containing
up to hundreds of thousands of pipes and nodes. The proposed framework
is mainly based on quantifying the redundancy and capacity of all possible
routes from demand nodes to their supply sources. This approach works well
with large network sizes since it does not rely on precise hydraulic simulations,
which require complex calibration processes and computation, while remaining
meaningful from a physical and a topological point of view. The proposal is
also tailored for the analysis of sectorised networks through a novel multiscale
method for analysing connectivity, which is successfully tested in operational
utility network models made of more than 100,000 nodes and 110,000 pipes.