For years, particularly in developing counries, companies providing drinking water service

(EPS) have used empirical procedures to locae, in tir distribution netwrks, the points at
which periodic sampling should be done in order to ensure that they comply with the
minimum water quality standards. Althogh tday these cmpanies have excellent computer
tools to model the dynamics of water in networks, as well as the evolution of water quality,
there is not enough data to scientifically choose these poins. In particular, the decay
coefficients of chlorine, both body and wall, are not available. Despite this limitation,
methodologies have been developed and implemented with the aim of designing sensor
networks that guarantee monitoring of water quality in distribution systems, but these
involve a high degree of uncertainty. In the research object of this article, a methodology
was developed that would allow in this environment of few data, to choose water quality
monitoring points (PMC) that responded simultaneously to two typical problems of
distribution networks. On the one hand, the aim was to guarantee the quality of the water,
as measured by a chlorine residual, using software developed for this study, and on the
other hand to detect problems of water coloring (a phenomenon in which water reaches a
set of water). users have a different color than transparent, affecting the perception of
quality by said users) due to the detachment of biofilms, making use of the TEVA-SPOT
program (Berry et al., 2008). This last approach can be developed under the optimization of
multiple objective functions according to the type of protection that one wishes to
guarantee, against the coloration events. The new methodology was applied successfully in
the 37 hydraulic sectors in which the drinking water network of the city of Bogotá,
Colombia (approximately 8,000,000 inhabitants) is divided. Finally, although the study was
carried out for the 37 sectors, one of these sectors was taken, as an example for this
document, as a type network. The results show that both methodologies are reliable and that
the design of the sensor network depends on the objective to be optimized. Published in
technology and water sciences: ISSN 2007-2422