Scaling Water Consumption Statistics
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 141, Issue 5
Abstract
Water consumption is perhaps the main process governing water distribution systems. Because of its uncertain nature, water consumption should be modeled as a stochastic process or characterized using statistical tools. This paper presents a description of water consumption using statistics as the mean, variance, and correlation. The analytical equations expressing the dependency of these statistics on the number of served users, observation time, and sampling rate, namely, the scaling laws, are theoretically derived and discussed. Real residential water consumption data are used to assess the validity of these theoretical scaling laws. The results show a good agreement between the scaling laws and scaling behavior of real data statistics. The scaling laws represent an innovative and powerful tool allowing inference of the statistical features of overall water consumption at each node of a network from the process that describes the demand of a user unit without loss of information about its variability and correlation structure. This will further allow the accurate simulation of overall nodal consumptions, reducing the computational time when modeling networks.
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Acknowledgments
The participation of the first author in the study is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under grant SFRH/BD/65842/2009.
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Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 141 • Issue 5 • May 2015
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 12, 2013
Accepted: Jun 10, 2014
Published online: Jul 28, 2014
Discussion open until: Dec 28, 2014
Published in print: May 1, 2015
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