One meter to find them all-water network leak localization using a single flow meter

Leak localization is a major issue faced by water utilities worldwide. Leaks are ideally detected and localized by a network-wide metering infrastructure. However, in many utilities, in-network metering is minimally present at just the inlets of subnetworks called District Metering Area (DMA). We consider the problem of leak localization using data from a single flow meter placed at the inlet of a DMA. We use standard time-series based modeling to detect if a current meter reading is a leak or not, and if so, to estimate the excess flow. Conventional approaches use an a-priori fully calibrated hydraulic model to map the excess flow back to a set of candidate leak locations. However, obtaining an accurate hydraulic model is expensive and hence, beyond the reach of many water utilities. We present an alternate approach that exploits the network structure and static properties in a novel way. Specifically, we extend the use of centrality metrics to infrastructure domains and use these metrics to map from the excess leak flow to the candidate leak location(s). We evaluate our approach on benchmark water utility network topologies as well as on real data obtained from an European water utility. On benchmark topologies, the localization obtained by our method is comparable to that obtained from a complete hydraulic model. On a real-world network, we were able to localize two out of the three leaks whose data we had access to. Of these two cases, we find that the actual leak location was in the candidate set identified by our approach; further, the approach pruned as much as 78% of the DMA locations, indicating a high degree of localization.