A Dynamic Flowmeter-Monitoring Path-Partitioning Strategy for Real-Time Demand Estimation in Water Distribution Systems

The hydraulic model serves as an effective tool for operational simulation, dispatch decision-making, and engineering planning in water distribution systems (WDSs). The increasing complexity of large-scale networks and the growing number of monitoring devices present both challenges and opportunities for the online calibration of WDSs in terms of efficiency and accuracy. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel strategy, Flowmeter-Monitoring Path-Partitioning (FMPP), for nodal demand calibration of hydraulic models. FMPP partitions nodes based on the monitoring paths of flowmeters, which include all downstream nodes of a given flowmeter. Then, a system of equations is formulated from the mass and energy conservation, and an iterative optimization process is employed to calibrate the nodal demands. This method enables the partitioning of nodes to achieve the optimal granularity, enabling each flowmeter to be calibrated individually and also reducing the calibration parameters through node grouping. The performance of the proposed method has been validated through two comprehensive case studies, demonstrating its superiority to conventional calibration techniques in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency, and practical applicability in real-time nodal demand estimation. This approach meets the requirements for the real-time calibration of nodal demand in complex large-scale pipe networks.