Graph Neural Networks for Pressure Estimation in Water Distribution Systems

Pressure and flow estimation in water distribution networks (WDNs) allows water management companies to optimize their control operations. For many years, mathematical simulation tools have been the most common approach to reconstructing an estimate of the WDNs hydraulics. However, pure physics-based simulations involve several challenges, for example, partially observable data, high uncertainty, and extensive manual calibration. Thus, data-driven approaches have gained traction to overcome such limitations. In this work, we combine physics-based modeling and graph neural networks (GNN), a data-driven approach, to address the pressure estimation problem. Our work has two main contributions. First, a training strategy that relies on random sensor placement making our GNN-based estimation model robust to unexpected sensor location changes. Second, a realistic evaluation protocol that considers real temporal patterns and noise injection to mimic the uncertainties intrinsic to real-world scenarios. As a result, a new state-of-the-art model, GAT with Residual Connections, for pressure estimation is available. Our model surpasses the performance of previous studies on several WDNs benchmarks, showing a reduction of absolute error of ≈40% on average.