A Review on Current Technologies and Future Direction of Water Leakage Detection in Water Distribution Network

Abstract

Water leakage in the supply system is a silent problem that costs billions of dollars yearly. As these supply pipes are mostly underground, this leakage remains undetected for a long time. In 2019, Liemberger and Wyatt estimated an annual loss of thirty-nine billion dollars due to water leakage in the supply pipe. In this systematic review, we have analyzed forty-seven articles about water leakage detection and location research. The aim is to find the new technology, trends, and possible direction in this research field. We have derived four research questions. The first question was about how the research evolved over time, and we have observed that researchers focus more on experimental data collection, ML algorithms, and IoT technology. The second question was about the sensor the researcher was using. The most popular sensors researchers have used are: vibration, acoustic, and flow sensors, as they are cheap and easy to install. We can also see some novel applications of image and optical fiber sensors. The third question was about the trend in the algorithm. ML and threshold-based algorithms are dominating the field. The fourth question was about the communication technology trend, and WIFI, cellular IoT, and LoRa technology are leading the space capturing 80% of the research.