AUTOMATED LEAK DETECTION SYSTEM FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF WATER NETWORK MANAGEMENT

The need for an efficient Water Management System (WMS) is strongly felt by water utilities, municipalities and by medium to large scale corporates that have to face every day with problems dealing with water usage and supply. Leveraging a sensor data network, an automated system to implement fault detection in a water network at an early stage can be a valuable tool that saves water, energy, time and money. The paper introduces a novel FDD approach for water networks developed within the FP7 Waternomics Project by modeling a water network in the simulation environment EPANET and applying an anomaly detection algorithm named ADWICE to real time data of water flow and pressure to infer performance and operational anomalies. The method is currently being implemented at the Linate Airport water network in Milan, and the results will be presented in the paper. The paper will also show how the same EPANET model can be integrated in a web based Decision Support System to help water network managers in defining optimal and demand based pressure management in order to reduce water leaks by reducing pressure where and when possible.