CANARY: A Water Quality Event Detection Algorithm Development Tool

The detection of anomalous water quality events has become an increased priority for distribution systems, both for quality of service and security reasons. Because of the high cost associated with false detections, both missed events and false alarms, algorithms which aim to provide event detection and need to be evaluated and configured properly. CANARY has been developed to provide both real-time, and off-line analysis tools to aid in the development of these algorithms, allowing algorithm developers to focus on the algorithms themselves, rather than on how to read in data and drive the algorithms. Among the features to be discussed and demonstrated are: 1) use of a standard data exchange format for input and output of water quality and operations data streams; 2) the ability to "plug in" various water quality change detection algorithms, both in MATLAB® and compiled library formats for testing and evaluation by using a well defined interface; 3) an "operations mode" to simulate what a utility operator will receive; 4) side-by-side comparison tools for different evaluation metrics, including ROC curves, time to detect, and false alarm rates. Results will be shown using three algorithms previously developed using test and real-life data sets.