Abstract
Apparent water losses can be problematic to water companies’ revenues. This type of loss is very difficult to detect and quantify and is often associated with water meter anomalies. This study was motivated by a water company’s challenge that links a decrease in water consumption to water meters’ malfunction. The aim is to develop a strategy to detect decreasing water usage patterns, contributing to meter performance assessment. The basis of the approach is a combination of statistical methods. First, the time series of billed water consumption is decomposed using Seasonal-Trend decomposition based on Loess. Next, breakpoint analysis is performed on the seasonally adjusted time series. After that, the Mann–Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimator are used to analyze periods of progressive decrease changes in water consumption, defined by breakpoints. A quantitative indicator of this change is proposed. The strategy was successfully applied to eight-time series of water consumption from the Algarve, Portugal.
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Data Availability Statement
The data, models, and the code used that support this study’s findings are available in a repository online: https://github.com/ClaraCordeiro/StrategyWaterMeterPerformance.
Reproducible Results
Soraia Pereira (Universidade de Lisboa) downloaded all the materials, installed, ran the models using the data and functions in “Workspace_data_functions.RData”, and reproduced the results in Tables 1 and 2.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editors, two referees, and a reproducibility reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions, which greatly improved this paper and the information available in the GitHub repository. The idea behind this work began at the 140th European Study Group with Industry (ESGI140), held in Portugal in June 2018, and it was motivated by the challenge proposed by Infraquinta (https://www.infraquinta.pt/en/) under the theme “Evaluating Water Meters.” The authors are grateful to the water company Infraquinta and Loulé Municipality (http://www.cm-loule.pt/pt/Default.aspx) for providing the water consumption data and inside technical guidance. Clara Cordeiro is partially financed by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under the project UIDB/00006/2020. Ana Borges work has been supported by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through project UIDB/04728/2020. M. Rosário Ramos was partially supported by National Funding from FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under the project UIDB/04561/2020.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 148 • Issue 2 • February 2022
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This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Received: Jul 29, 2020
Accepted: Sep 13, 2021
Published online: Nov 18, 2021
Published in print: Feb 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Apr 18, 2022
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