The steady state of a water distribution system abides by the laws of mass and energy conservation. Hydraulic solvers, such as the one used by EPANET approach the simulation for a given topology with a Newton-Raphson algorithm. However, iterative approximation involves a matrix inversion which acts as a computational bottleneck and may significantly slow down the process. In this work, we propose to rethink the current approach for steady state estimation to leverage the recent advancements in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) hardware. Modern GPUs enhance matrix multiplication and enable memory-efficient sparse matrix operations, allowing for massive parallelization. Such features are particularly beneficial for state estimation in infrastructure networks, which are characterized by sparse connectivity between system elements. To realize this approach and tap into the potential of GPU-enhanced parallelization, we reformulate the problem as a diffusion process on the edges of a graph. Edge-based diffusion is inherently related to conservation laws governing a water distribution system. Using a numerical approximation scheme, the diffusion leads to a state of the system that satisfies mass and energy conservation principles. Using existing benchmark water distribution systems, we show that the proposed method allows parallelizing thousands of hydraulic simulations simultaneously with very high accuracy.

The operation of water distribution systems is based on reliable knowledge about the steady state of the system. This involves sensors to measure flow, facilitating a comprehensive overview of the system’s performance. Given the costs associated with sensor installation and operation, it is important to be strategic with sensor allocation. Recently developed Gaussian Processes with topological kernels can efficiently model mass and energy conservative flows and provide uncertainty bounds. Our work proposes a novel method of state estimation and a greedy search algorithm for water flow meter placement based on the uncertainty bounds provided by a Gaussian Process.

Data-driven metamodels reproduce the input-output mapping of physics-based models while significantly reducing simulation times. Such techniques are widely used in the design, control, and optimization of water distribution systems. Recent research highlights the potential of metamodels based on Graph Neural Networks as they efficiently leverage graph-structured characteristics of water distribution systems. Furthermore, these metamodels possess inductive biases that facilitate generalization to unseen topologies. Transferable metamodels are particularly advantageous for problems that require an efficient evaluation of many alternative layouts or when training data is scarce. However, the transferability of metamodels based on GNNs remains limited, due to the lack of representation of physical processes that occur on edge level, i.e. pipes. To address this limitation, our work introduces Edge-Based Graph Neural Networks, which extend the set of inductive biases and represent link-level processes in more detail than traditional Graph Neural Networks. Such an architecture is theoretically related to the constraints of mass conservation at the junctions. To verify our approach, we test the suitability of the edge-based network to estimate pipe flowrates and nodal pressures emulating steady-state EPANET simulations. We first compare the effectiveness of the metamodels on several benchmark water distribution systems against Graph Neural Networks. Then, we explore transferability by evaluating the performance on unseen systems. For each configuration, we calculate model performance metrics, such as coefficient of determination and speed-up with respect to the original numerical model. Our results show that the proposed method captures the pipe-level physical processes more accurately than node-based models. When tested on unseen water networks with a similar distribution of demands, our model retains a good generalization performance with a coefficient of determination of up to 0.98 for flowrates and up to 0.95 for predicted heads. Further developments could include simultaneous derivation of pressures and flowrates.

Metamodels accurately reproduce the output of physics-based hydraulic models with a significant reduction in simulation times. They are widely employed in water distribution system (WDS) analysis since they enable computationally expensive applications in the design, control, and optimisation of water networks. Recent machine-learning-based metamodels grant improved fidelity and speed; however, they are only applicable to the water network they were trained on. To address this issue, we investigate graph neural networks (GNNs) as metamodels for WDSs. GNNs leverage the networked structure of WDS by learning shared coefficients and thus offering the potential of transferability. This work evaluates the suitability of GNNs as metamodels for estimating nodal pressures in steady-state EPANET simulations. We first compare the effectiveness of GNN metamodels against multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on several benchmark WDSs. Then, we explore the transferability of GNNs by training them concurrently on multiple WDSs. For each configuration, we calculate model accuracy and speedups with respect to the original numerical model. GNNs perform similarly to MLPs in terms of accuracy and take longer to execute but may still provide substantial speedup. Our preliminary results indicate that GNNs can learn shared representations across networks, although assessing the feasibility of truly general metamodels requires further work.