Harnessing Risks with Data: A Leakage Assessment Framework for WDN Using Multi-Attention Mechanisms and Conditional GAN-Based Data Balancing

Assessing leakage risks in water distribution networks (WDNs) and implementing preventive monitoring for high-risk pipelines has become a widely accepted approach for leakage control. However, existing methods face significant data barriers between Geographic Information System (GIS) and leakage prediction systems. These barriers hinder traditional pipeline risk assessment methods, particularly when addressing challenges such as data imbalance, poor model interpretability, and lack of intuitive prediction results. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a leakage assessment framework for water distribution networks based on multiple attention mechanisms and a generative model-based data balancing method. Extensive comparative experiments were conducted using water distribution network data from B2 and B3 District Metered Areas in Zhengzhou. The results show that the proposed model, optimized with a balanced data method, achieved a 40.76% improvement in the recall rate for leakage segment assessments, outperforming the second-best model using the same strategy by 1.7%. Furthermore, the strategy effectively enhanced the performance of all models, further proving that incorporating more valid data contributes to improved assessment results. This study comprehensively demonstrates the application of data-driven models in the field of “smart water management”, providing practical guidance and reference cases for advancing the development of intelligent water infrastructure.