Application of a neural network model to short-term water demand forecasting

Abstract

Relationships between water demand, pressure, and leakage highlight the need for accurate supply to match demand. This study addresses the challenges of forecasting short-term water demand and was part of the Battle for Water Demand Forecasting competition involving 10 real-world District Metered Areas in Italy. A nine-layer convolutional neural network model was proposed that considers demand from previous time steps, time of the day, weather conditions, day type, and other deterministic temporal factors to predict water demand. Bayesian optimization was used for hyperparameter tuning. The model can predict and forecast short-term water demand with reasonable accuracy.