Cracks Under Pressure? Burst Prediction in Water Networks Using Dynamic Metrics

Abstract

Ranking pipes according to their burst likelihood can help a water utility triage its proactive maintenance budget effectively. In the research literature, data-driven approaches have been used recently to predict pipe bursts. Such approaches make use of static features of the individual pipes such as diameter, length, and material to estimate burst likelihood for the next year by learning over past historical data. The burst likelihood of a pipe also depends on dynamic features such as its pressure and flow. Existing works ignore dynamic features because the features need to be measured or are difficult to obtain accurately using a well-calibrated hydraulic model. We complement prior data-driven approaches by proposing a methodology to approximately estimate the dynamic features of individual pipes from readily available network structure and other data. We study the error introduced by our approximation on an academic benchmark water network with ground truth. Using a real-world pipe burst dataset obtained from a European water utility for multiple years, we show that our approximate dynamic features improve the ability of machine learning classifiers to predict pipe bursts. The performance (as measured by the percentage of future bursts predicted) of the best forming classifier improves by nearly 50% through these dynamic features.