2020/12/09 by Ahmad F. Taha, Taha, Ahmad F., Shen Wang +11
Engineering · Environmental Science · #FOS: Electrical engineering #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Underwater Vehicles and Communication Systems #Water Quality Monitoring Technologies #Water Systems and Optimization #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.05268
openalex publication_date 2020/12/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Real-time water quality (WQ) sensors in water distribution networks (WDN)\nhave the potential to enable network-wide observability of water quality\nindicators, contamination event detection, and closed-loop feedback control of\nWQ dynamics. To that end, prior research has investigated a wide range of\nmethods that guide the geographic placement of WQ sensors. These methods assign\na metric for fixed sensor placement (SP) followed by\n\metric-optimization to obtain optimal SP. These metrics include\nminimizing intrusion detection time, minimizing the expected population and\namount of contaminated water affected by an intrusion event. In contrast to the\nliterature, the objective of this paper is to provide a computational method\nthat considers the overlooked metric of state estimation and network-wide\nobservability of the WQ dynamics. This metric finds the optimal WQ sensor\nplacement that minimizes the state estimation error via the Kalman filter for\nnoisy WQ dynamics -- a metric that quantifies WDN observability. To that end,\nthe state-space dynamics of WQ states for an entire WDN are given and the\nobservability-driven sensor placement algorithm is presented. The algorithm\ntakes into account the time-varying nature of WQ dynamics due to changes in the\nhydraulic profile -- a collection of hydraulic states including heads\n(pressures) at nodes and flow rates in links which are caused by a demand\nprofile over a certain period of time. Thorough case studies are given,\nhighlighting key findings, observations, and recommendations for WDN operators.\nGithub codes are included for reproducibility.\n