To solve water hammer problems in pipeline systems,many numerical simulation approaches have been developed. This paper improves a flux vector splitting( FVS) scheme whose grid is the same as the fixedgrid MOC scheme. The proposed FVS scheme is used to analyze water hammer problems caused by a pump abrupt shutdown in a pumping system with an air vessel. This paper also proposes a pump-valve-vessel model combining a pump-valve model with an air vessel model. The results show that the data obtained by the FVS scheme are similar to the ones obtained by the fixed-grid method of characteristics( MOC). And the results using the pump-valve-vessel model are almost the same as the ones using both the pump-valve model and the air vessel model. Therefore,it is effective that the proposed FVS scheme is used to solve water hammer problems and the pump-valve-vessel model replaces both the pump-valve model and the air vessel model to simulate water hammer flows in the pumping system with the air vessel. To solve water hammer problems in pipeline systems, many numerical simulation approaches have been developed. This paper improves a flux vector splitting (FVS) scheme whose grid is the same as the fixed grid MOC scheme. The proposed FVS scheme is used to analyze water hammer problems caused by a pump abrupt shutdown in a pumping system with an air vessel. This paper also proposes a pump-valve-vessel model combining a pump-valve model with an air vessel model. The results show that the data obtained by the FVS scheme are similar to the ones obtained by the fixed-grid method of characteristics (MOC). And the results using the pump-valve-vessel model are almost the same as the ones using both the pump-valve model and the air vessel model. Thus, it is effective that the proposed FVS scheme is used to solve water hammer problems and the pump-valve-vessel model replaces both the pump-valve model and the air vessel model to simulate water hammer flows in the pumping system with the air vess el.