Distributed Sensor Fusion in Water Quality Event Detection
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 137, Issue 1
Abstract
To protect drinking water systems, a contamination warning system can use in-line sensors to indicate possible accidental and deliberate contamination. Currently, reporting of an incident occurs when data from a single station detects an anomaly. This paper proposes an approach for combining data from multiple stations to reduce false background alarms. By considering the location and time of individual detections as points resulting from a random space-time point process, Kulldorff’s scan test can find statistically significant clusters of detections. Using EPANET to simulate contaminant plumes of varying sizes moving through a water network with varying amounts of sensing nodes, it is shown that the scan test can detect significant clusters of events. Also, these significant clusters can reduce the false alarms resulting from background noise and the clusters can help indicate the time and source location of the contaminant. Fusion of monitoring station results within a moderately sized network show false alarm errors are reduced by three orders of magnitude using the scan test.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions. The writers would also like to thank Dr. James Uber for permission to use the “metropolis” water distribution network. This work was funded by the U.S. EPA National Homeland Security Research Center (NHSRC) under an interagency agreement. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract No. DOEDE-AC04-94AL85000.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 137 • Issue 1 • January 2011
Pages: 10 - 19
Copyright
© 2011 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 18, 2009
Accepted: Apr 7, 2010
Published online: May 4, 2010
Published in print: Jan 2011
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