`Just One More Sensor is Enough' -- Iterative Water Leak Localization with Physical Simulation and a Small Number of Pressure Sensors
This addresses the challenge of leak detection for less equipped water networks by reducing the required number of sensors, though it is incremental as it builds on existing sensitivity matrix methods.
The paper tackles the problem of water leak localization in complex water delivery grids by proposing an iterative algorithm that uses physical simulation and a small number of pressure sensors, with the ability to relocate one sensor, achieving very good approximation of leak positions in both simulated and real-life cases.
In this article, we propose an approach to leak localisation in a complex water delivery grid with the use of data from physical simulation (e.g. EPANET software). This task is usually achieved by a network of multiple water pressure sensors and analysis of the so-called sensitivity matrix of pressure differences between the network's simulated data and actual data of the network affected by the leak. However, most algorithms using this approach require a significant number of pressure sensors -- a condition that is not easy to fulfil in the case of many less equipped networks. Therefore, we answer the question of whether leak localisation is possible by utilising very few sensors but having the ability to relocate one of them. Our algorithm is based on physical simulations (EPANET software) and an iterative scheme for mobile sensor relocation. The experiments show that the proposed system can equalise the low number of sensors with adjustments made for their positioning, giving a very good approximation of leak's position both in simulated cases and real-life example taken from BattLeDIM competition L-Town data.