Abstract
Residential water demand consists one of the most uncertain factors posing extra difficulties in the efficient planning and management of urban water systems. Currently, high resolution data from smart meters provide the means for a better understanding and modelling of this variable at a household level and fine temporal scales. Having this in mind, this paper examines the statistical and distributional properties of residential water demand at a 15-minute and hourly scale, which are the temporal scales of interest for the majority of urban water modeling applications. Towards this, we investigate large residential water demand records of different characteristics. The analysis indicates that the studied characteristics of the marginal distribution of water demand vary among households as well as on the basis of different time intervals. Both month-to-month and hour-to-hour analysis reveal that the mean value and the probability of no demand exhibit high variability while the changes in the shape characteristics of the marginal distributions of the nonzero values are significantly less. The investigation of performance of 10 probabilistic models reveals that Gamma and Weibull distributions can be used to adequately describe the nonzero water demand records of different characteristics at both time scales.
Highlights
Residential water demand is characterized by high temporal and spatial variability consisting of the most influential source of uncertainty that poses extra difficulties in the efficient planning and management of urban water systems [1,2,3]
The present study examines the statistical characteristics and peculiarities of 15-minute and hourly residential water demand based on the “iWIDGET dataset” consisting of 11 long records from single-households in Greece
In order to provide more rigorous and concrete insights on the distributional properties of water demand, the analysis was conducted on the basis of 360 individual records, which are derived after the study of seasonal variation of the main statistical characteristics of 15-minute and hourly water demand data
Summary
Residential water demand is characterized by high temporal and spatial variability consisting of the most influential source of uncertainty that poses extra difficulties in the efficient planning and management of urban water systems [1,2,3]. The present study takes into account recent advances in stochastic simulation field [26,27,28,29,30], which alleviate the barriers [31] in the deployment of typical linear stochastic models in cases of non-Gaussian and intermittent processes such as residential water demand at fine time scales, allowing the reproduction of the whole marginal distribution of the process In this respect, 15-minute and hourly water demand should be treated and examined as an intermittent variable with a mixed-type marginal distribution, which is composed of a probability mass concentrated at zero (i.e., discrete part) and a continuous part that describes probabilistically the nonzero demand magnitudes.
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