Near Real-Time Detection and Approximate Location of Pipe Bursts and Other Events in Water Distribution Systems

The research work presented in this thesis describes the development and testing of a new data analysis methodology for the automated near real-time detection and approximate location of pipe bursts and other events which induce similar abnormal pressure/flow variations (e.g., unauthorised consumptions, equipment failures, etc.) in Water Distribution Systems (WDSs). This methodology makes synergistic use of several self-learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) and statistical/geostatistical techniques for the analysis of the stream of data (i.e., signals) collected and communicated on-line by the hydraulic sensors deployed in a WDS. These techniques include: (i) wavelets for the de-noising of the recorded pressure/flow signals, (ii) Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for the short-term forecasting of future pressure/flow signal values, (iii) Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for the selection of optimal ANN input structure and parameters sets, (iv) Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques for the short and long term analysis of the burst/other event-induced pressure/flow variations, (v) Bayesian Inference Systems (BISs) for inferring the probability of a burst/other event occurrence and raising the detection alarms, and (vi) geostatistical techniques for determining the approximate location of a detected burst/other event. The results of applying the new methodology to the pressure/flow data from several District Metered Areas (DMAs) in the United Kingdom (UK) with real-life bursts/other events and simulated (i.e., engineered) burst events are also reported in this thesis. The results obtained illustrate that the developed methodology allowed detecting the aforementioned events in a fast and reliable manner and also successfully determining their approximate location within a DMA. The results obtained additionally show the potential of the methodology presented here to yield substantial improvements to the state-of-the-art in near real-time WDS incident management by enabling the water companies to save water, energy, money, achieve higher levels of operational efficiency and improve their customer service. The new data analysis methodology developed and tested as part of the research work presented in this thesis has been patented (International Application Number: PCT/GB2010/000961).University of Exete

Pattern Recognition and Clustering of Transient Pressure Signals for Burst Location

[EN] A large volume of the water produced for public supply is lost in the systems between sources and consumers. An important-in many cases the greatest-fraction of these losses are physical losses, mainly related to leaks and bursts in pipes and in consumer connections. Fast detection and location of bursts plays an important role in the design of operation strategies for water loss control, since this helps reduce the volume lost from the instant the event occurs until its effective repair (run time). The transient pressure signals caused by bursts contain important information about their location and magnitude, and stamp on any of these events a specific "hydraulic signature". The present work proposes and evaluates three methods to disaggregate transient signals, which are used afterwards to train artificial neural networks (ANNs) to identify burst locations and calculate the leaked flow. In addition, a clustering process is also used to group similar signals, and then train specific ANNs for each group, thus improving both the computational efficiency and the location accuracy. The proposed methods are applied to two real distribution networks, and the results show good accuracy in burst location and characterization.Manzi, D.; Brentan, BM.; Meirelles, G.; Izquierdo Sebastián, J.; Luvizotto Jr., E. (2019). Pattern Recognition and Clustering of Transient Pressure Signals for Burst Location. Water. 11(11):1-13. https://doi.org/10.3390/w11112279S1131111Creaco, E., & Walski, T. (2017). Economic Analysis of Pressure Control for Leakage and Pipe Burst Reduction. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 143(12), 04017074. doi:10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000846Campisano, A., Creaco, E., & Modica, C. (2010). RTC of Valves for Leakage Reduction in Water Supply Networks. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 136(1), 138-141. doi:10.1061/(asce)0733-9496(2010)136:1(138)Campisano, A., Modica, C., Reitano, S., Ugarelli, R., & Bagherian, S. (2016). Field-Oriented Methodology for Real-Time Pressure Control to Reduce Leakage in Water Distribution Networks. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 142(12), 04016057. doi:10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000697Vítkovský, J. P., Simpson, A. R., & Lambert, M. F. (2000). Leak Detection and Calibration Using Transients and Genetic Algorithms. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 126(4), 262-265. doi:10.1061/(asce)0733-9496(2000)126:4(262)Pérez, R., Puig, V., Pascual, J., Quevedo, J., Landeros, E., & Peralta, A. (2011). Methodology for leakage isolation using pressure sensitivity analysis in water distribution networks. Control Engineering Practice, 19(10), 1157-1167. doi:10.1016/j.conengprac.2011.06.004Jung, D., & Kim, J. (2017). Robust Meter Network for Water Distribution Pipe Burst Detection. Water, 9(11), 820. doi:10.3390/w9110820Colombo, A. F., Lee, P., & Karney, B. W. (2009). A selective literature review of transient-based leak detection methods. Journal of Hydro-environment Research, 2(4), 212-227. doi:10.1016/j.jher.2009.02.003Choi, D., Kim, S.-W., Choi, M.-A., & Geem, Z. (2016). Adaptive Kalman Filter Based on Adjustable Sampling Interval in Burst Detection for Water Distribution System. Water, 8(4), 142. doi:10.3390/w8040142Christodoulou, S. E., Kourti, E., & Agathokleous, A. (2016). Waterloss Detection in Water Distribution Networks using Wavelet Change-Point Detection. Water Resources Management, 31(3), 979-994. doi:10.1007/s11269-016-1558-5Guo, X., Yang, K., & Guo, Y. (2012). Leak detection in pipelines by exclusively frequency domain method. Science China Technological Sciences, 55(3), 743-752. doi:10.1007/s11431-011-4707-3Holloway, M. B., & Hanif Chaudhry, M. (1985). Stability and accuracy of waterhammer analysis. Advances in Water Resources, 8(3), 121-128. doi:10.1016/0309-1708(85)90052-1Sanz, G., Pérez, R., Kapelan, Z., & Savic, D. (2016). Leak Detection and Localization through Demand Components Calibration. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 142(2), 04015057. doi:10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000592Zhang, Q., Wu, Z. Y., Zhao, M., Qi, J., Huang, Y., & Zhao, H. (2016). Leakage Zone Identification in Large-Scale Water Distribution Systems Using Multiclass Support Vector Machines. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 142(11), 04016042. doi:10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000661Mounce, S. R., & Machell, J. (2006). Burst detection using hydraulic data from water distribution systems with artificial neural networks. Urban Water Journal, 3(1), 21-31. doi:10.1080/15730620600578538Covas, D., Ramos, H., & de Almeida, A. B. (2005). Standing Wave Difference Method for Leak Detection in Pipeline Systems. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 131(12), 1106-1116. doi:10.1061/(asce)0733-9429(2005)131:12(1106)Liggett, J. A., & Chen, L. (1994). Inverse Transient Analysis in Pipe Networks. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 120(8), 934-955. doi:10.1061/(asce)0733-9429(1994)120:8(934)Caputo, A. C., & Pelagagge, P. M. (2002). An inverse approach for piping networks monitoring. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 15(6), 497-505. doi:10.1016/s0950-4230(02)00036-0Van Zyl, J. E. (2014). Theoretical Modeling of Pressure and Leakage in Water Distribution Systems. Procedia Engineering, 89, 273-277. doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2014.11.187Izquierdo, J., & Iglesias, P. . (2004). Mathematical modelling of hydraulic transients in complex systems. Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 39(4-5), 529-540. doi:10.1016/s0895-7177(04)90524-9Lin, J., Keogh, E., Wei, L., & Lonardi, S. (2007). Experiencing SAX: a novel symbolic representation of time series. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 15(2), 107-144. doi:10.1007/s10618-007-0064-zNavarrete-López, C., Herrera, M., Brentan, B., Luvizotto, E., & Izquierdo, J. (2019). Enhanced Water Demand Analysis via Symbolic Approximation within an Epidemiology-Based Forecasting Framework. Water, 11(2), 246. doi:10.3390/w11020246Meirelles, G., Manzi, D., Brentan, B., Goulart, T., & Luvizotto, E. (2017). Calibration Model for Water Distribution Network Using Pressures Estimated by Artificial Neural Networks. Water Resources Management, 31(13), 4339-4351. doi:10.1007/s11269-017-1750-2Adamowski, J., & Chan, H. F. (2011). A wavelet neural network conjunction model for groundwater level forecasting. Journal of Hydrology, 407(1-4), 28-40. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2011.06.013Brentan, B., Meirelles, G., Luvizotto, E., & Izquierdo, J. (2018). Hybrid SOM+ k -Means clustering to improve planning, operation and management in water distribution systems. 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Pattern recognition and clustering of transient pressure signals for burst location

A large volume of the water produced for public supply is lost in the systems between sources and consumers. An important-in many cases the greatest-fraction of these losses are physical losses, mainly related to leaks and bursts in pipes and in consumer connections. Fast detection and location of bursts plays an important role in the design of operation strategies for water loss control, since this helps reduce the volume lost from the instant the event occurs until its effective repair (run time). The transient pressure signals caused by bursts contain important information about their location and magnitude, and stamp on any of these events a specific "hydraulic signature". The present work proposes and evaluates three methods to disaggregate transient signals, which are used afterwards to train artificial neural networks (ANNs) to identify burst locations and calculate the leaked flow. In addition, a clustering process is also used to group similar signals, and then train specific ANNs for each group, thus improving both the computational efficiency and the location accuracy. The proposed methods are applied to two real distribution networks, and the results show good accuracy in burst location and characterization111

Sensor placement for fault location identification in water networks: A minimum test cover approach

This paper focuses on the optimal sensor placement problem for the identification of pipe failure locations in large-scale urban water systems. The problem involves selecting the minimum number of sensors such that every pipe failure can be uniquely localized. This problem can be viewed as a minimum test cover (MTC) problem, which is NP-hard. We consider two approaches to obtain approximate solutions to this problem. In the first approach, we transform the MTC problem to a minimum set cover (MSC) problem and use the greedy algorithm that exploits the submodularity property of the MSC problem to compute the solution to the MTC problem. In the second approach, we develop a new \textit{augmented greedy} algorithm for solving the MTC problem. This approach does not require the transformation of the MTC to MSC. Our augmented greedy algorithm provides in a significant computational improvement while guaranteeing the same approximation ratio as the first approach. We propose several metrics to evaluate the performance of the sensor placement designs. Finally, we present detailed computational experiments for a number of real water distribution networks

Artificial Neural Network Model for a Low Cost Failure Sensor: Performance Assessment in Pipeline Distribution

YesThis paper describes an automated event detection and location system for water distribution pipelines which is based upon low-cost sensor technology and signature analysis by an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The development of a low cost failure sensor which measures the opacity or cloudiness of the local water flow has been designed, developed and validated, and an ANN based system is then described which uses time series data produced by sensors to construct an empirical model for time series prediction and classification of events. These two components have been installed, tested and verified in an experimental site in a UK water distribution system. Verification of the system has been achieved from a series of simulated burst trials which have provided real data sets. It is concluded that the system has potential in water distribution network management

Design, characterization, and sensitivity of the supernova trigger system at Daya Bay

Providing an early warning of galactic supernova explosions from neutrino signals is important in studying supernova dynamics and neutrino physics. A dedicated supernova trigger system has been designed and installed in the data acquisition system at Daya Bay and integrated into the worldwide Supernova Early Warning System (SNEWS). Daya Bay's unique feature of eight identically-designed detectors deployed in three separate experimental halls makes the trigger system naturally robust against cosmogenic backgrounds, enabling a prompt analysis of online triggers and a tight control of the false-alert rate. The trigger system is estimated to be fully sensitive to 1987A-type supernova bursts throughout most of the Milky Way. The significant gain in sensitivity of the eight-detector configuration over a mass-equivalent single detector is also estimated. The experience of this online trigger system is applicable to future projects with spatially distributed detectors.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, to be submitted to Astroparticle Physic