A review of methods for leakage management in pipe networks

Abstract

Leakage in water distribution systems is an important issue which is affecting water companies and their customers worldwide. It is therefore no surprise that it has attracted a lot of attention by both practitioners and researchers over the past years. Most of the leakage management related methods developed so far can be broadly classified as follows: (1) leakage assessment methods which are focusing on quantifying the amount of water lost; (2) leakage detection methods which are primarily concerned with the detection of leakage hotspots and (3) leakage control models which are focused on the effective control of current and future leakage levels. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the above methods with the objective to identify the current state-of-the-art in the field and to then make recommendations for future work. The review ends with the main conclusion that despite all the advancements made in the past, there is still a lot of scope and need for further work, especially in area of real-time models for pipe networks which should enable fusion of leakage detection, assessment and control methods.

Keywords:

• distribution system
• leakage assessment
• leakage control
• leakage detection
• pipe network
• water distribution systems
• leakage model, pressure-dependent leakage

Acknowledgements

The first author would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Estonian Science Foundation (ETF7646).