Abstract
<jats:p>Modern urban water distribution systems require intelligent monitoring and autonomous protection mechanisms to prevent contamination and ensure public safety. This paper presents an intelligent decision-support framework integrating Differential Evolution (DE) optimization, EPANET hydraulic simulation, rule-based contamination risk assessment, and a real-time digital twin dashboard. The proposed system continuously monitors water quality parameters including chlorine concentration, turbidity, pressure, and temperature while performing rule-based contamination risk estimation and emergency response control. The developed framework can automatically isolate contaminated network zones using smart valve control and provide intelligent operational recommendations. Beyond the original single-function demonstration, this extended study validates the DE implementation against ten standard benchmark functions, benchmarks it against a particle swarm optimizer under a matched evaluation budget, quantifies the contamination-detection logic against twenty synthetic test scenarios spanning safe, boundary, and multi-fault conditions, and couples a second DE search directly to the EPANET hydraulic model to test pump-speed and valve-setpoint operating envelopes against real simulated pressure constraints rather than an abstract proxy objective. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system successfully improves contamination detection, visualization, and autonomous response capabilities for smart city water infrastructures; the EPANET-coupled search further shows that, within the physically reasonable pump-speed range tested, the network's surplus hydraulic capacity leaves no interior energy-pressure trade-off for the optimizer to find, a genuine, if modest, finding about the network's spare capacity. The study also surfaces implementation considerations, including a still-simplified default optimization objective and several software integration issues, that mark the clearest next steps toward a deployable system.</jats:p>