State estimation in water distribution system via diffusion on the edge space

The steady state of a water distribution system abides by the laws of mass and energy conservation. Hydraulic solvers, such as the one used by EPANET approach the simulation for a given topology with a Newton-Raphson algorithm. However, iterative approximation involves a matrix inversion which acts as a computational bottleneck and may significantly slow down the process. In this work, we propose to rethink the current approach for steady state estimation to leverage the recent advancements in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) hardware. Modern GPUs enhance matrix multiplication and enable memory-efficient sparse matrix operations, allowing for massive parallelization. Such features are particularly beneficial for state estimation in infrastructure networks, which are characterized by sparse connectivity between system elements. To realize this approach and tap into the potential of GPU-enhanced parallelization, we reformulate the problem as a diffusion process on the edges of a graph. Edge-based diffusion is inherently related to conservation laws governing a water distribution system. Using a numerical approximation scheme, the diffusion leads to a state of the system that satisfies mass and energy conservation principles. Using existing benchmark water distribution systems, we show that the proposed method allows parallelizing thousands of hydraulic simulations simultaneously with very high accuracy.