Digital twin assisted decision support system for quality regulation and leak localization task in large-scale water distribution networks

Effective water resource management is essential in large metropolitan cities. Digital Twins (DT), supported by IIoT and machine learning technologies, provide opportunities for real-time prediction and optimization for effective decision-making in water distribution systems. A framework for the digital twin of the Water Distribution Network (WDN) is developed in this paper to achieve higher operational efficiency using ‘WNTR’, the Python-based library of EPANET. All computational experiments and methods were validated on the benchmark hydraulic C-TOWN network (Ostfeld et al., 2011). The hydraulic parameters and quality parameters of the DT model for the water network were calibrated using the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. The calibrated DT served as a real-time proxy to generate simulation data, which is used for two different applications in large-scale water networks: (i) Disinfectant dosage regulation task using booster stations and (ii) pipe leakage localization task. The calibrated DT was utilized to estimate the optimal disinfectant dosing rates, ensuring water quality control within an acceptable range using optimization. The results highlight the effectiveness of the neural network and real-time optimization strategy to achieve the optimal dosing rate. For the leakage localization task, the Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) based neural network trained on the DT was found to predict leakage location very accurately.