Abstract
The simulation of Water Distribution Systems (WDSs) has a crucial role in the network analysis for system planning, network design, rehabilitation strategies and operational strategies optimization. It has been demonstrated that the classical WDSs model, which assigns the water demand into the nodes of the network using a demand driven approach, leads to significant errors in the hydraulic network simulations. In order to overcome this drawback, two modelling trends have been developed in the last decade: on one hand, pressure driven approach with water demand lumped at the network nodes, and on the other hand, uniformly distributed water demand scheme using pressure driven approach. However, only with the distributed pressure driven approach the above improvements have been merged into one complete model. This model allows to accurately simulate the WDSs behaviour in order to obtain a proper pipes flow rates, a fitting hydraulic heads distribution and a suitable water demand under critical pressure conditions.