Abstract
The simple GA exhibits low reliability when applied to pipe network optimisation. This paper presents a technique called "gene therapy" to produce optimal water distribution pipe networks with high reliability. In principle it provides an artificial way of creating new generations of chromosomes by binary addition and subtraction between the fittest chromosome in a generation and artificially created chromosomes. The procedure is described in the paper and applied to the pipe network optimisation of water distribution systems. The results obtained are compared with the results of the simple GA. Significant improvement in the performance is reported.