Deep learning–based short-term water demand forecasting in urban areas: a hybrid multichannel model

Forecasting short-term water demands is one of the most critical needs of operating companies of urban water distribution networks. Water demands have a time series nature, and various factors affect their variations and patterns, which make it difficult to forecast. In this study, we first implemented a hybrid model of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to forecast urban water demand. These models include a combination of CNN with simple RNN (CNN-Simple RNN), CNN with the gate recurrent unit (CNN-GRU), and CNN with the long short-term memory. Then, we increased the number of CNN channels to achieve higher accuracy. The accuracy of the models increased with the number of CNN channels up to four. The evaluation metrics show that the CNN-GRU model is superior to other models. Ultimately, the four-channel CNN-GRU model demonstrated the highest accuracy, achieving a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.65% for a 24-h forecasting horizon. The effects of the forecast horizon on the accuracy of the results were also investigated. The results show that the MAPE for a 1-h forecast horizon is 1.06% in four-channel CNN-GRU, and its value decreases with the amount of the forecast horizon.