Sequence-to-Sequence Deep Learning for Urban Water Demand Forecasting

Accurate urban water demand (UWD) forecasts are key to the effective management of water distribution systems. This research explores the potential of encoder–decoder models, specifically sequence-to-sequence (S2S) deep learning models, for UWD forecasting. Two models were developed as follows: one based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and another using transformers. The models were trained on data from ten district metered areas (DMAs) in Northeast Italy. The results confirmed that the transformer models consistently outperformed the LSTM models across all DMAs, with an average (across all DMAs) improvement in mean absolute error of 15.3%.