Water demand forecasting in multiple district metered areas based on a multi-scale correction module neural network architecture

Qidong Que; Jinliang Gao; Yizhou Qian

doi:10.1016/j.wroa.2024.100269

Water demand forecasting in multiple district metered areas based on a multi-scale correction module neural network architecture

Water Res X. 2024 Oct 22:25:100269. doi: 10.1016/j.wroa.2024.100269. eCollection 2024 Dec 1.

Authors

Qidong Que^{1

2}, Jinliang Gao^{1

2}, Yizhou Qian³

Affiliations

¹ School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China.
³ School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

Abstract

Short-term water demand forecasting (STWDF) for multiple spatially and temporally correlated District Metering Areas (DMAs) is an essential foundation for achieving more refined management of urban water supply networks. However, due to the greater uncertainty associated with specific DMA demand compared to overall water usage, accurately predicting STWDF poses significant challenges. This study introduces an innovative network architecture-the multi-scale correction module neural network, built upon Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) enhanced with Attention mechanisms-for simultaneous STWDF with a temporal resolution of one hour over a week for 10 DMAs located in a single city in northern Italy. This framework utilizes multivariate corrections to refine and enhance the output accuracy. The results reveal that, in comparison to traditional Gated Recurrent Unit or LSTM models, the proposed model with integrated correction modules, particularly those that leverage inter-DMA correlations, improves performance across all evaluation metrics by an average of 5 %-20 % per DMA. Additionally, it consistently delivers superior accuracy across three scenarios: single DMA forecasting, total water demand, and extreme conditions, while maintaining stable performance throughout. Furthermore, the interpretability analysis underscores the feasibility of this innovative structure and highlights the contribution of meteorological features to the predictive model in some DMA-level STWDF. The unified input-output framework elegantly simplifies the STWDF process across multiple DMAs, providing new insights and methodologies for future research in this domain.

Keywords: Attention mechanism; Convolutional Neural Network; Interpretability in deep learning; Long-short term memory neural network; Short-term water demand forecasting.