Extended-horizon analysis of pressure sensitivities for leak detection in water distribution networks: Application to the Barcelona network

In this paper, a model-based leak detection and isolation approach for water distribution networks (WDN), which considers an extended time horizon analysis of pressure sensitivities is proposed. It differs from previous works based on pressure sensitivities analysis since the existing approaches were considering time instant evaluation. This fact makes those approaches very sensitive to demand changes and noise in measurements. A fault isolation approach based on new criterion, known as the angle method, is introduced. This criterion is based on evaluating the angle between the residual vector and the columns of the leak sensitivity matrix. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with two well established methods in the literature (the least square optimization and the correlation methods) when they are applied to the Barcelona WDN.