Short-term water demand modeling plays a key role in urban water resources planning and management. The importance of demand prediction is even greater in countries like Iran with frequent periods of drought. Short-term water demand estimation is useful for planning and management of water and wastewater facilities such as pump scheduling, control of reservoirs and tanks volume, pressure management and water conservation programs. This helps the network managers to decrease vulnerability of the system and consumers and to increase network reliability.
Exact prediction of short-term water demand which is a function of different complex parameters is difficult, time consuming and even impossible. In this research Artificial Neural Networks method (ANN) with back propagation algorithm is used to develop a model for daily water demand prediction of the city of Tehran (center of Iran) using climate parameters and previous daily water consumption records. Several structures were considered with one and two hidden layers and 0- 50 neurons. Also different linear and nonlinear functions were tested for the layers and finally nonlinear function was chosen for the hidden layers and linear function for the output layer. Furthermore, each year was divided into two parts and different models were constructed for hot and cold months.
About four years data for Tehran daily water consumption was available. The model was calibrated by daily data for two years period. At the learning stage, in order to establish the optimal structure of the ANN model, the case of two hidden layers and seven neurons produced the best results and therefore, it was applied for water demand prediction in this city. Results indicate that ANN models can be used to predict Tehran short-term daily water demand, properly. Model evaluation showed that the correlation coefficients for demand prediction are more than 80% for both learning and testing data and the average of error is only 2%. Comparison of the results from ANN and Fuzzy models showed that the ANN outputs are more accurate. Furthermore, a simple formula was proposed to evaluate daily water demand of Tehran using results of a one layer one neuron ANN model with just two input parameters of the last day temperature and water consumption. The results showed good correlation with the measured values with mean error of less than 3%. It can be concluded that a useful model and a simple formula have been produced as the outcomes of this research which can help Tehran water company decision makers for better operating of the system.
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