Abstract

Smart water systems rely on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to monitor critical physical assets such as pipes, valves, junctions, and pumps, but these cyber-physical systems are vulnerable to sensor outages and communication disruption. This paper studies resilience in a smart water context by modeling the physical water network and the sensor communication network as interdependent graphs coupled through monitoring links, and analyzing their degradation using percolation theory. We simulate three sensor failure modes; random hardware faults, targeted removals of topologically critical sensors and spatially correlated failures representing localized hazards. The performance of the system is quantified using connectivity of the sensor network (giant-component size), monitoring coverage of physical infrastructure, percolation-based critical thresholds and an integral robustness index. The simulated experiments showed that resilience depends strongly on the failure mechanism such as