Nowadays, the rapid growth of operational costs and human resource shortages increase
the importance of the leakage reduction, and the pressure management. This paper presents
an optimisation procedure placing pressure-reducing valves (PRVs) to minimise the
water losses of real-life water distribution networks (WDNs). The number and placement
of the valves are optimised from clustering perspective with the Leiden algorithm.
The optimal settings of the valves are determined with a differential evolution algorithm,
where a compound fitness function is applied. On the one hand, it minimises the leakages,
on the other hand, evades the pressure-dependent consumer outages, i.e. it keeps the
pressure above the desired. Seven real-life water distribution networks were analysed
from the region of Western Hungary using the techniques. Moreover, three of them are
analysed in details. The robustness of the achieved leakage reduction with the optimised
PRV placement is analysed to the uncertainty of the leakage exponent.
