Water Research 166 (2019) 115058

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Water Research
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Deep learning identifies accurate burst locations in water distribution

networks
Xiao Zhou a, c, Zhenheng Tang b, Weirong Xu a, Fanlin Meng c, *, Xiaowen Chu b,
Kunlun Xin a, d, **, Guangtao Fu c, e
a
College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 200092, Shanghai, China
b
Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
c
Centre for Water Systems, College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4QF, UK
d
Shanghai Institute of Pollution Control and Ecological Security, 200092, Shanghai, China
e
The Alan Turing Institute, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Pipe bursts in water distribution networks lead to considerable water loss and pose risks of bacteria and
Received 1 April 2019 pollutant contamination. Pipe burst localisation methods help water service providers repair the burst
Received in revised form pipes and restore water supply timely and efficiently. Although methods have been reported on burst
31 August 2019
detection and localisation, there is a lack of studies on accurate localisation of a burst within a potential
Accepted 5 September 2019
district by accessible meters. To address this, a novel Burst Location Identification Framework by Fully-
Available online 6 September 2019
linear DenseNet (BLIFF) is proposed. In this framework, additional pressure meters are placed at limited,
optimised places for a short period (minutes to hours) to monitor system behaviour after the burst. The
Keywords:
Burst localisation
fully-linear DenseNet (FL-DenseNet) newly developed in this study modifies the state-of-the-art deep
Deep learning learning algorithm to effectively extract features in the limited pressure signals for accurate burst
DenseNet localisation. BLIFF was tested on a benchmark network with different parameter settings, which showed
Pipe burst that accurate burst localisation results can be achieved even with high model uncertainties. The
Water distribution network framework was also applied to a real-life network, in which 57 of the total 58 synthetic bursts in the
potential burst district were correctly located when the top five most possible pipes are considered and
among them, 37 were successfully located when considering only the top one. Only one failed because of
the very small pipe diameter and remote location. Comparisons with DenseNet and the traditional fully
linear neural network demonstrate that the framework can effectively narrow the potential burst district
to one or several pipes with good robustness and applicability. Codes are available at https://github.com/
wizard1203/waternn.
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

1. Introduction billion m3 of drinking water (a value of over $9 billion) is lost per

Water loss is a key issue in the management of water distribu-
tion systems as in addition to the depletion of water resources, it
also causes additional energy and chemical usage for water treat-
ment and supply and poses risks of bacteria and pollutant
contamination (Fontanazza et al., 2015). For example, about 29
* Corresponding author. Centre for Water Systems, College of Engineering,
Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4QF, UK
** Corresponding author. College of Environmental Science and Engineering,
Tongji University, 200092, Shanghai, China.
E-mail addresses: m.fanlin@exeter.ac.uk (F. Meng), xkl@mail.tongji.edu.cn
(K. Xin).
year in Asia (Frauendorfer and Liemberger, 2010) and about 7.85
billion m3 of water was lost in 2017 in China (CUWA, 2017). Pipe
bursts in water distribution networks (WDNs) are a main source of
water loss (AWWA, 2009); moreover, they often lead to social im-
pacts like water service interruptions and traffic delays (Berardi
et al., 2008). As such, it is critical that the location of a pipe burst
can be determined effectively for efficient restoration of water
supply.
With the development of supervisory control and data acqui-
sition (SCADA) systems, real-time monitoring of pressure and/or
flow data are being widely used for the detection and localisation of
pipe bursts in WDNs. The deviation of real-time data from the
normal range of system behaviour is a key principle adopted in

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2019.115058
0043-1354/© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
2 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058
literature for burst detection/localisation. To establish the normal
performance expected from a WDN, models have been developed
based on data driven techniques, such as machine learning models
(Mounce et al., 2002, 2010a; Romano et al., 2014) and clustering
analysis (Wu et al., 2016). The deviation can also be analysed using
hydraulic models (Bicik et al., 2010; Meseguer et al., 2014; Wu et al.,
2010; Zhou et al., 2018). The data-driven techniques were found to
be effective in burst detection but incompetent in burst localisation
(Wu and Liu, 2017). The model-based approaches rely heavily on
the accuracy of the hydraulic model (Hutton et al., 2014) and do not
perform as well in larger WDNs as in small ones. Other burst
localisation methods using pressure/flow measurements have also
been proposed based on spatial analysis of the change in pressure/
flow data across a WDN. For example, Mounce et al. (2003) used a
triangle-based cubic interpolation to create a pressure drop surface
during a burst to estimate its location. In Farley et al. (2013), the
location of a burst within a district metering area (DMA) was
inferred by the sensitivities of different pressure/flow measure-
ments with respect to a burst outflow. Romano et al. (2013)
employed multivariate Gaussian mixtures-based graphical model
and geostatistical techniques to exploit data from a larger number
of pressure meters to determine the potential positions of a burst
within a DMA. Nevertheless, due to the insensitivity of pressures to
bursts (Bakker et al., 2014), and as normally random demand
fluctuations could mask the hydraulic variations caused by bursts,
these methods can only narrow down the potential locations of a
burst to a rough district as large as hundreds of meters including at
least several tens of pipes, which is insufficient for timely repair of
pipe burst and service restoration.
For more accurate localisation of pipe bursts, new, targeted
monitoring is usually required to collect detailed information (e.g.
acoustic or transient signals) of system behaviour at the potential
locations to detect the abnormality. Acoustic equipment such as
listening sticks and noise correlators are widely used for manual
inspection. Despite the effectiveness and easy implementation,
they are very labour intensive. By temporarily placing accelerom-
eter sensors and analysing the acoustic signals, the method pro-
posed by Kang et al. (2018) can detect the location of a burst/
leakage automatically. However, its reliability is sensitive to the
characteristics of the leak conditions (e.g. water pressure, leak flow
rate), and the detection range is limited by the clarity and corre-
lation of acoustic signals. Transient-based methods (Colombo et al.,
2009) locate bursts by analysing transient wave features such as
propagation, reflection and damping. However, the background
noise or other activities in a system may shadow the burst-induced
transient signals, especially if the number of pipes to be analysed
increases (Wu and Liu, 2017). Moreover, some methods in this
category need computationally demanding mathematical simula-
tions and the high frequency sensors employed are costly. As such,
the current acoustic or transient-based methods are not suitable for
accurate burst locating from a reasonably large area (e.g. a DMA or
tens of pipes) to a single pipe. Pressure meters can be a good
alternative as they are easy to install, e.g. at any hydrant or other
tapping points, and are less costly than flow meters. A possible
solution to overcome the insensitivity of pressures is to mutually
complement key features in pressures at different moments, and
fuse and identify the features in a continuous period of measure-
ments by pattern recognition algorithms.
Although machine learning algorithms such as traditional arti-
ficial neural networks (ANNs), clustering, and support vector ma-
chines have been used to detect and/or locate bursts (Mounce et al.,
2002, 2010a; Romano et al., 2014; Wu et al., 2016), they need to
hand design suitable feature extractors and are difficult to learn
complex features. In recent years, as a newly-developed subfield of
ANNs, deep learning technology (LeCun et al., 2015) has become a
powerful tool for feature identification and pattern recognition.
Comparing with the traditional machine learning algorithms, very
complex functions can be learned from raw data with the key
features automatically extracted. Convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) are the most widely used deep learning methods. More
recently, researchers found that CNNs can be deeper, thus more
accurate and efficient to train if they have shorter connections
between former layers and latter layers (Srivastava et al., 2015).
Based on this, Huang et al. (2017) proposed a novel densely con-
nected convolutional network (DenseNet) architecture, which im-
proves the flow of information and gradients among layers,
intensifies the propagation of features, and encourages feature
reuse. Thus, DenseNet provides better parameter efficiency and is
easier to be trained with better accuracy.
CNNs (including DenseNet), which employ convolutional layers
to detect local conjunctions of features from the previous layers and
pooling layers to merge semantically similar features (LeCun et al.,
2015), show higher accuracy in identifying objects with abundant
local features (e.g. language, images or videos) than global features.
However, the global features of a WDN pressure signal such as its
amplitude and time variation could be more important, and the
convolution and pooling procedures may disorganise the global
features. In this study, we proposed a new fully-linear DenseNet
(FL-DenseNet) by replacing the convolutional layers in DenseNet
with linear connections. Benefiting from the dense connectivity
pattern, FL-DenseNet enables the key features in pressure signals to
be automatically extracted and more efficiently learned.
This study aims to propose a novel Burst Location Identification
Framework by FL-DenseNet (BLIFF). It can effectively identify the
accurate location (a single or a few pipes) of a burst from a larger
potential district (e.g. a DMA). BLIFF uses the hydraulic model of a
WDN to simulate bursts to train FL-DenseNet. The newly collected
pressure data at the optimised meter locations are fed to the
trained FL-DenseNet for prediction of burst location. The frame-
work is applied on two case studies and its robustness against the
accuracy of system hydraulic model is examined.
2. Methodology
Built on the hydraulic model of a WDN, FL-DenseNet extracts
features in pressure patterns when a burst occurs at each pipe. This
is based on the fact that 1) for any burst, the responses in pressure
drop caused by a burst outflow vary at different nodes across a
WDN, and 2) for any node, the pressure variations when the burst
occur at different pipes also vary. By matching the learnt features
with new monitoring data, the likelihood of burst occurring at
every pipe can be predicted. The structure of the proposed BLIFF is
introduced in Section 2.1 with a few key steps described in Sections
2.2 to 2.5.
2.1. Burst Location Identification Framework by FL-DenseNet
Fig. 1 shows the flow chart for the proposed BLIFF. As high-
lighted in the top box (in dashed lines), a key assumption is that a
burst has already been detected and the potential district of the
burst (a DMA, or tens to hundreds of potential pipes) is given. BLIFF
consists of eight steps, the first four of which can be done either
offline or simultaneously with the latter four after a burst is
detected.
The first step of BLIFF is to choose the optimal locations for the
added pressure meters in the potential burst district so that effec-
tive and efficient collection of burst information can be made using
the least number of meters. The meters should be sensitive to flow
changes occurring in the potential burst district. The optimisation
and sampling design are described in detail in Section 2.3. The
 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058
Fig. 1. A flowchart of BLIFF.
hydraulic model of a WDN built on EPANET3 (Rossman, 2010; Yan
et al., 2019), which allows for pressure-driven analysis (PDA), is
employed to simulate pipe bursts. Further details are provided in
Section 2.4. The simulation results are processed and fed to train FL-
DenseNet (described in Section 2.2). The data preprocessing, as
described in Section 2.5, can improve the learning performance by
amplifying key features and improving comparability in pressure
measurements. After a pipe burst is detected, pressure meters are
placed at the optimised nodes to collect dynamic pressure changes
within a prescribed duration (in minutes to hours, further
described in Section 2.4.3). The collected monitoring data are pre-
processed according to the procedure described in Section 2.5 and
then fed to the trained FL-DenseNet model for prediction.
2.2. Fully-linear DenseNet
FL-DenseNet differs from the original DenseNet by replacing
convolutional layers with linear connections and omitting the
pooling layers. Similar to other ANNs, FL-DenseNet is based on a
collection of connected processors (i.e. artificial neurons), which
form an input layer, a number of hidden layers (i.e. a series of dense
Fig. 2. A flowchart of FL-DenseNet.
3
blocks and transition layers) to transfer, analyse and weight the
input information, and an output layer. An illustrative flowchart is
shown in Fig. 2 and the detailed description is provided as fol-
lows.where ½l0 ; l1 ; …; li1  is a concatenation of the previous layers
0; 1; …; i  1; Ci is a composite function, which includes three
consecutive operations: batch normalisation (BN) (Ioffe and
Szegedy, 2015), rectified linear unit (ReLU) (Schmidhuber, 2015),
and a linear connection.
1) Input layer: it receives input information (e.g. preprocessed
pressure measurements) in the form of matrices or vectors.
2) Dense block: it contains a number of layers which are connected
by a dense connectivity pattern. Namely, there are direct con-
nections from any layer to all subsequent layers (Huang et al.,
2017), and a layer li can receive the outputs of all preceding
layers at its input:
li ¼ Ci ð½l0 ; l1 ; …; li1 Þ (1)
3) Transition layer: It is also a combination of BN, ReLU and linear
connection and is used to link the blocks to fuse different
characters.
4) Prediction: A softmax classifier is attached at the end of the last
dense block to give the prediction results. In this study, a
probability value of burst occurring is generated for every pipe
in the potential burst district.
2.3. Optimisation of pressure meter locations
In a WDN, the sensitivity of nodal pressures to the changing of
nodal outflows can be indicated by a Jacobian matrix, which con-
tains the gradient information of nodal pressure with respect to
nodal outflow as presented in Eq. (2):


Vq H ¼ vH vq (2)
where Vq H is the Jacobian matrix, of which the elements represent
the sensitivities of nodal heads with respect to nodal outflows; H is
the vector of nodal heads; q is the vector of nodal outflows. An
explicit method proposed by Liu et al. (2017) is employed in our
study to solve Vq H.
Three parameters are proposed to measure the effectiveness of
meters, which are coverage limit (CL ), coverage number (CN ) and
coverage rate (CR ). For node i and pressure meter at node j, if
4 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058

  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Vq H ij
 CL (3) qburst ¼ Cd Aori 2gHori (7)

then node i is considered to be covered by meter at node j. As such,
CL determines the minimum sensitivity that the meters should
meet. If node i is covered by more than CN meters, node i is
considered to be sufficiently covered. The higher the value of CN ,
the richer the information can be used to train FL-DenseNet. CR is
the ratio of sufficiently covered nodes with respect to all nodes in
the potential burst district. For example, if CL , CN , and CR are set as
0.02, 2, and 85% respectively, then there should be at least 85% of
nodes are covered (½Vq Hij > 0:02) by no less than two meters.
The optimal pressure meter locations are those which can
satisfy the threshold limits defined by CL, CN , and CR with the least
number of meters. The optimisation model can be expressed as
below.
min jSj
S∢f1;…;np g
where qburst is the burst flow; Cd is the outflow coefficient,
Cd ¼ 0:5  0:7 depending on the Reynolds number and the shape
of the orifice (Lambert, 2001), and is set to be 0.6 in this study; Aori
is area of the orifice and Hori is the pressure. It is assumed that Aori ¼
gAij , where Aij is the cross-sectional area of corresponding pipe ij; g
is an intensity coefficient, which is determined by the intensity of a
burst. Therefore, we can simulate different scales of burst flow on a
pipe by assigning different values of g. For example, for a pipe with
a diameter of 200 mm and a pressure of 30m, g ¼ 10% corresponds
to a burst flow of 45.7L/s and g ¼ 30% corresponds to 137.1L/s.
Different values of g are used and examined in this work.
The embedded leakage simulation model in EPANET3, which is
based on Eq. (8), is used to calculate the orifice outflow equation
and simulate burst flows,
(4)
qleak
ij ¼ aij Hbij ,Lij (8)

Subject to
where qleak
ij , Hij and Lij are the leakage flow, pressure and length of
pipe ij, respectively; aij and b are parameters to be determined. If aij
1 X
np X    
c c Vq H ij  CL  CN  CR (5) and b are defined according to Eq. (9),
np i¼1 jεS pffiffiffiffiffiffi
Cd gAij 2g
aij ¼ ; b ¼ 0:5 (9)
where np is the number of nodes in the potential burst district; set S Lij
contains the selected meter locations, element j in S denotes that a
meter is placed at node j; jSj denotes the cardinality of the set S; c: then the right side of Eq. (8) will be the same as that of the orifice
R1f0; 1g is defined as cðaÞ ¼ 1 if a 0, and 0 otherwise. The outflow formula in Eq. (7) Therefore, using the parameters defined
optimisation problem is solved by the genetic algorithm (GA) in Eq. (9), we can employ EPANET3 to simulate burst (orifice
(Holland, 1992). GA is a metaheuristic algorithm which is widely outflow) on pipe ij, and g is the only parameter to be determined.
used to solve optimisation problems in urban water management As PDA is employed in this study, the burst flow rate is dynamic
(Meng et al., 2016; Fu et al., 2013). Inspired by natural selection, GA with the change of water pressure on a pipe.
creates a set of solutions in the feasible region as individuals, which
evolve into better individuals in the next generation by means of
bio-inspired operators such as crossover, mutation, and selection. 2.4.1. Uncertainties of model parameters
This process is repeated until satisfactory results are obtained. The There are no perfect/accurate hydraulic models of any WDNs
GA Toolbox in MATLAB is used in our study. due to the various sources of uncertainty (Hutton et al., 2014; Savic
et al., 2009). For example, there are inherent random patterns in the
behaviour of water usage and the scale/characteristics of a pipe
burst; moreover, some parameters (e.g. pipe roughness co-
2.4. Training data generation
efficients) cannot be precisely measured. To make realistic as-
sumptions for BLIFF and test its robustness against the accuracy of
EPANET3 is employed to build the hydraulic model of a WDN
the hydraulic model, the following parameters are simulated in a
and perform extended period simulations in this study, as it enables
stochastic manner.
PDA which can produce a more realistic representation of the
pressure deficient situations under pipe bursts (Yan et al., 2019). A
 Pipe roughness coefficients and nodal demands. White Gaussian
nodal outflow is dependent on its nodal pressure in a PDA model,
noises Nð0; s2 Þ are added to the existing roughness coefficients
which is calculated according to the Wagner's formulas (Wagner
and diurnal nodal demand curves, with the standard deviation
et al., 1988):
values for the two parameters being sC and sq , respectively.
8 Smaller standard deviation should be assigned if a hydraulic
>
> 0 H*i < Hmin model is well calibrated. Otherwise, a larger value should be
>
>
i
>
> !1=h
>
< used.
H*i  Hmin  Intensity coefficient g. Pipe burst flow rate can vary in a wide
q*i ¼ req
qi i
Hmin < H*i < Hi
req
(6)
>
> req
Hi  Hmin
i
range in real life and it is hard (if possible) to know the exact
>
> i
>
> outflow rate of a burst even after its detection. The burst flow is
>
:
H *i > Hi
req req
qi assumed to be affected by the diameter and the intensity coef-
ficient g of a burst pipe in this work; g is simulated as a random
req
where q*i and qi is the available outflow and required demand at number which follows the uniform distribution Uðgmin ; gmax Þ.
node i, respectively; H *i is the pressure at node i; h is the head
req
exponent, generally h ¼ 1:5  2; H min i and H i is the minimum
pressure and required pressure, respectively. The values of h, H min
i
req
and H i are set as 2, 0m and 30m in this study (He et al., 2016). 2.4.2. Simulation of pipe burst
The flow rate of a burst on a pipe is assumed to follow the orifice The procedures for the simulation of a burst are summarised in
outflow formula in Eq. (7). six steps described below.
 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058
(1) Set pipe ij as the pipe where a burst occurs.
(2) For each pipe, draw a noise value from Nð0; s2C Þ and add it to
the original roughness coefficient.
(3) For each node, draw noise values from Nð0; s2q Þ and add them
to elements of the nodal demand curve respectively.
(4) Randomly select intensity coefficient g from Uðgmin ; gmax Þ
and calculate the parameter aij, and assign leakage parame-
ters aij and b to pipe ij.
(5) Employ EPANET3 to run the hydraulic simulation with the
assigned parameter values.
(6) Record pressure values at selected monitoring nodes.
2.4.3. Generation of training data
Besides sC , sq and ðgmin ; gmax Þ mentioned in Section 2.4.1,
values of the following parameters also need to be defined for the
generation of the training data set.
 Number of samples per pipe (Ntr ). To support feature identifi-
cation of a pipe burst against various sources of uncertainties,
the simulation of pipe burst on any single pipe is performed for
Ntr times with stochastic parameter settings. As such, the total
number of samples in the training data set is Ntr  mp if there are
mp pipes in the potential burst district.
 Duration of data collection (Td ). After a burst occurs, pressure
needs to be monitored at the optimised locations (described in
Section 2.3) for a prescribed duration Td . As nodal pressures are
likely to show distinctive features at different times of a day
driven by water usage behaviours, the time parameters of the
training data should correspond to those of actual bursts for
effective machine learning. For example, assuming that a burst
occurs at 2pm and field pressure data is measured from 3pm for
24 h (Td ¼ 24h) with a 15-min interval, when generating
training data, the burst should also starts at 2pm and the report
start time, time step and duration (corresponding to the time
parameters in EPANET3) should be 3pm, 15 min and 24 h,
respectively. A longer Td is likely to yield a higher prediction
accuracy as more data are captured. However, it also means
longer waiting time (for the burst localisation) before a burst can
be repaired, thus a trade-off needs to be made. Different values
of Td are tested in this work.
 Number of pressure meters (Nm ). Pressures are monitored at the
Nm selected nodes both for the generation of training data and
for the field monitoring. The number and location of meters are
decided by the values of CL , CN , and CR , as described in Section
2.3. The accuracy of model prediction is likely to be higher with
a larger Nm, but this increases the expenditures on the sampling
equipment. Although a specific value of Nm needs to be deter-
mined for the generation of a training data set, similar to Ntr and
Td , different values are tested for comprehensive analysis and
discussion.
The four steps summarised below are used in our study to
generate training data.
(1) Choose parameter values for sC, sq , ðgmin ; gmax Þ, Ntr , Td and
Nm .
(2) Set pipe ij as the pipe where a burst occurs, simulate the
burst and record pressure values at monitoring nodes.
(3) Repeat step (2) for Ntr times, each of which uses newly
randomly generated noise values and intensity coefficient.
Ntr burst records are generated for pipe ij.
(4) For all the mp pipes in the potential burst district, repeat
steps (2)e(3), and Ntr  mp burst records are generated as
the training data.
5
2.5. Data preprocessing
The pressure data at a node (meter) m can be expressed as:
H m ¼ ½Hm1 ; Hm2 ; …; Hmn 0 (10)
where H m denotes the monitored pressures at node m with fixed
time intervals. The length of H m is decided by the Data collection
duration (Td ) and interval. For example, if Td ¼ 24h with a time
interval of 15 min, then the length of H m is 96 (n ¼ 96). The pres-
sure measurements at all available meters can be expressed as a
matrix as shown below
2 3
H11 / Hm1
H ¼ ½H 1 ; H 2 ; …; H m  ¼ 4 « 1 « 5 (11)
H1n / Hmn
2.5.1. Nonlinear mapping
The nonlinear mapping procedure is applied to facilitate feature
extraction as it can amplify the time-variation features of an orig-
inal data set and increase the dimension of the original feature
space. For each H m , defines
S m ¼ diagðH m Þ,H m (12)
where the operator diag converts the vector to a diagonal matrix, of
which the diagonal is the original vector and other elements are 0.
For all the measurements, S ¼ ½S 1 ; S 2 ; …; S m .
2.5.2. Data normalisation
As pressures of different meters may have diverse ranges
affected by the location and elevation of the meters, we need to
normalise the values to make the pressures at different meters
more comparable. Besides, normalisation can help to improve the
accuracy and efficiency of FL-DenseNet (Al Shalabi and Shaaban,
2006). The z-score normalisation is employed to normalise the
data. Taken H m as an example,
g H m  mm
H m ¼ (13)
sm
where Hgm is the normalised vector; mm and sm are the mean and
standard deviation of all the measurements collected at node m.
Both H and S are normalised and fed to FL-DenseNet.
3. Case studies and results
Two cases (a benchmark network and a real-life WDN) are
studied to demonstrate the reliability and applicability of BLIFF. The
following default settings are used: sC ¼ 10, sq ¼ 10%, ðgmin ; gmax Þ
¼ ð10%; 30%Þ, Ntr ¼ 1800, Td ¼ 24h, Nm ¼ 4. The default sampling
interval is 15 min. The neural network structure and hyper-
parameters (whose values are set before the learning process be-
gins) used in the case studies are summarised in Table 1. For
example, the hidden layers of the FL-DenseNet used in case 1
consist of four dense blocks, which contain 8, 16, 16, and 12 dense
layers respectively; the learning rate we used for this network is
0.6. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FL-DenseNet,
four different kinds of ANNs are used for case 2, which are FL-
DenseNet, FL-DenseNet with the activation function (ReLU)
replaced by sigmoid function (Schmidhuber, 2015), DenseNet, and
the traditional fully linear neural network (FLNN). As the FLNN does
not contain dense blocks, its hidden layers are constituted by three
fully connected layers. The hyper-parameters of the ANNs are the
6 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058

Table 1
Network structure and hyper-parameters used in the case studies.

Dense blocks Layers in dense blocks Hidden layer type Activation function Learning rate

case1: FL-DenseNet 4 8, 16,16, 12 Linear ReLU 0.6

case2: FL-DenseNet 4 8, 16, 24, 16 Linear ReLU 0.1
case2: FL-DenseNet (sigmoid) 4 8, 16, 24, 16 Linear Sigmoid 0.15
case2: DenseNet 4 6, 12, 24, 16 Convolutional ReLU 0.0005
case2: FLNN - (3) Linear ReLU 0.00002

optimal parameters identified from a series of trials.
To test the performance, for each pipe in the potential burst
district, we simulate burst on it for Nte times and generate Nte  mp
burst data as the test samples, with the parameters be the same as
the training data. Nte is set to 200. After being trained, BLIFF pre-
dicts the location of the burst in the test samples. The prediction
accuracy of a test sample i can be assessed by pre1i and pre5i . BLIFF
will evaluate a burst happening probability for each pipe. If the pipe
with the highest probability is the true burst pipe, pre1i ¼ 1;
otherwise pre1i ¼ 0. If the top five pipes include the true burst pipe,
pre5i ¼ 1, otherwise pre5i ¼ 0, in which case the prediction is
considered as failed. The overall performance of BLIFF can be
assessed by Eqs. (14) and (15).
X
Nte mp
1 performance under different network physical or hydraulic condi-
acc1 ¼ pre1i
Nte  mp i¼1
X
Nte mp
1 200, a total of 200  34 test samples are generated with each
acc5 ¼ pre5i
Nte  mp i¼1
where acc1 and acc5 are the overall prediction accuracy of all test
samples corresponding to pre1i and pre5i .
3.1. Case 1
The Anytown (Walski et al., 1987) network, which is a highly-
looped small-sized WDN (Fig. 3), is employed to illustrate the
application of BLIFF and its performance under different settings.
The network consists of 16 nodes, 34 pipes, 2 tanks, and 1 reservoir.
The diameters of pipes range from 200 mm to 400 mm, and the
base demands of nodes range from 12.5 L/s to 63.8L/s. Different
diurnal demand patterns are allocated to different nodes.
The potential burst district is assumed to be the whole network,
that is, every pipe in the network is a potential location of the burst.
The least required number of pressure meters varies when different
threshold values are assigned for CL, CN , and CR . For example, if CL ,
CN , and CR were set as 0.01, 1, and 0.85 respectively, one meter is
sufficient if it is placed at node 9. If CL , CN , and CR are set as 0.02, 2,
and 0.85 respectively, at least four meters need to be placed and the
optimal locations are found to be nodes 3, 12, 15 and 17. The optimal
locations corresponding to different Nm are presented in Table 2
and marked in Fig. 3.
To provide insights on the practical application of BLIFF, its
(14) tions are analysed by using one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis. In the
analysis, one parameter setting is changed to a different value at a
time, while other parameters remain at default settings. As Nte ¼
(15) parameter setting. As the uncertainties in pipe roughness co-
efficients and nodal demands highly affect model accuracy in a joint
manner, the performance of BLIFF under different combinations of
sC and sq are analysed for a comprehensive representation of
different levels of hydraulic model accuracy. The results are shown
in Fig. 4.
As shown in Fig. 4a and b, the performance of BLIFF improves if
the uncertainties in pipe roughness and nodal demands decrease,
i.e. acc1 (in Fig. 4a) and acc5 (in Fig. 4b) increases with lower values
of sC and sq . If sC ¼ 5 and sq ¼ 5%, acc1 and acc5 are 99% and 100%
respectively (i.e. the top left corner of Fig. 4a and b). If sC and sq
increases to 20 and 25% respectively, the accuracy reduces with
acc1 ¼ 81% and acc5 ¼ 98% (i.e. the bottom right corner of Fig. 4a
and b). Nevertheless, satisfactory prediction results are still ob-
tained which indicates the high robustness of BLIFF against the
accuracy of the hydraulic models.
Results under different burst flow rates are presented in Fig. 4c.
It can be seen that the accuracy increases with the growth in ðgmin ;
gmax Þ, which corresponds to larger burst flows. If
ðgmin ; gmax Þ ¼ ð1%; 5%Þ (corresponding to a 4.6e22.9L/s burst flow
for a 200 mm pipe with 30 m pressure), acc1 is 35% and acc5 is 70%.
However, acc1 and acc5 become higher than 80% and 95% if ðgmin ;
gmax Þ increases to ð5%; 10%Þ (corresponding to a 22.9e45.7L/s burst
flow for a 200 mm pipe with 30 m pressure). This is expected as the
disturbance in pressure is more distinct with a higher burst flow,
which facilitates pattern recognition and burst localisation.
BLIFF can complement the features of pressures at different

Table 2
Optimal meter locations under different parameter sets.

CL CN CR Nm Optimal Meter Locations

0.02 2 0.85 4 Node 3,12,15,17

0.015 2 0.85 3 Node 4,11,17
0.01 2 0.85 2 Node 8,11
Fig. 3. Layout of the Anytown network and the optimal monitoring locations if
0.01 1 0.85 1 Node 9
different numbers (Nm ) of pressure meters are placed.
 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058 7

Fig. 4. The performance of BLIFF with different values of factors. (aeb) Joint effect of pipe roughness and nodal demands uncertainty; (cef) the effects of burst flow range, data
collection duration, number of meters, and time difference respectively.

moments to achieve higher accuracy, therefore, longer Td will in-
crease the prediction accuracy because pressures at more moments
are collected. However, shorter Td allows faster field data collection
hence the burst can be more rapidly located. The relationship be-
tween Td and prediction accuracy are shown in Fig. 4d. When Td ¼
0:25h (i.e. 15 min, which equals to the sampling interval, so only 2
pressure measurements are collected per meter), the acc1 and acc5
are 70% and 98%, respectively; when Td increases to more than 10 h,
acc1 reaches 96% and higher. The accuracy rates are higher than
80% if Td is 1 h, which is satisfactory and fits with regulations in the
water industry, such as the 3 h limit of response time in the UK
(Diao et al., 2016).
Meters should be placed at nodes where a burst can have suf-
ficient influence on the pressures. In our study, CL , CN and CR are
used to define the minimum sensitivity requirement that the
chosen meters should meet. Larger CL, CN and CR results in more
meters, which will increase the performance of BLIFF but also will
lead to more costs. As shown in Fig. 4e, when there is only one
meter in the network, acc1 and acc5 are 62% and 96%, respectively;
if four meters are installed, the acc1 and acc5 increased to 97% and
99%, respectively. acc5 is very high even with only one meter, which
indicates that it is also feasible to use fewer meters but employs
more manpower to locate burst (e.g. with listening sticks) within
the five identified pipes.
In generating the training data, the simulated start time of the
bursts should ideally be the same as the actual situation. However,
as FL-DenseNet could be trained in advance and in some cases we
cannot clearly confirm when the burst started, the start time of
burst simulation (ts ) may lag behind the real burst time (tb ). To test
its effect on the performance of BLIFF, the burst time of training
8 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058
Fig. 5. The performance of BLIFF with (a) different number of samples and (b) training epoch.
data (ts ) is set to 24:00 and the real burst time (tb ) of the test
samples is set to 12:00 to 24:00. Results are presented in Fig. 4f. It
can be seen that the accuracy decreased with larger lag times. The
main reason could be that the continuous burst outflow causes the
water level of the tanks to drop, hence the overall pressure distri-
bution during simulation is inconsistent with the actual situation.
However, even with a lag of 2 h, the accuracy of BLIFF is still higher
than 80%.
It is expected that the learning is more effective with larger Ntr
and training epoch. Training epoch indicates the number of times
that FL-DenseNet repeatedly learns the same training data set. The
default training epoch used in our study is 120. The effects of Ntr
and training epoch are presented in Fig. 5. As shown in Fig. 5a, acc1
and acc5 are 85% and 99% respectively if Ntr is 100 and increase
with larger Ntr. However, the increase rate becomes very small if Ntr
is over 1000. Fig. 5b shows that BLIFF can achieve good results
(acc1 > 90%) after 25 training epochs, with minor improvement
(acc1 > 97%) if over 85 training epochs is used. In this case, with
Ntr ¼ 1800, processing each epoch takes about 3.5 min on an i7-
4700MQ CPU, GTX850M GPU computer.
3.2. Case 2
A real network (though the burst data are synthetic) is used to
test the reliability of BLIFF under realistic settings. The network
(layout presented in Fig. 6) lies in eastern China, Jiangsu province. It
consists of 567 pipes (total length is147km), 480 junctions and 4
reservoirs, and supplies 57,000 tons of water per day. A burst is
assumed to happen at the lower left district of the network. This
potential burst district contains 58 pipes with different diameters
Fig. 6. A real-life network in China and detailed layout of its potential burst district].
ranging from 100 mm to 400 mm CL , CN and CR are set as 0.03, 2 and
0.9 respectively, and four optimal pressure meters are required.
Their locations are optimised according to Section 2.3.
The training data and test samples are generated using the
default parameter settings described at the beginning of Section 3.
As the potential burst district is connected with and affected by the
rest of the WDN, the uncertainties in the roughness coefficient and
nodal demand are also simulated for pipes/nodes outside the po-
tential burst district. To compare the performance of FL-DenseNet
with other ANNs, four different ANNs (as shown in Table 1) are
trained by the same training data and are evaluated with the same
test samples. Table 3 reports the results on acc1 and acc5 of the four
ANNs. Changing the activation function of FL-DenseNet from ReLU
to sigmoid has minimal effect on the results. Nevertheless, using
sigmoid is less computationally efficient than ReLU because
frequent exponential operations in sigmoid, which are computa-
tionally demanding, need to be performed. For DenseNet,
acc1 ¼ 31% and acc5 ¼ 67%, these accuracies are about half of those
of FL-DenseNet. The results demonstrate the validity of replacing
the convolutional layers in DenseNet with linear connections,
which can avoid the global features in pressure signals being dis-
organised. Besides, using linear connections requires less compu-
tational time than convolutional layers. Although the accuracy of
FLNN in this case seems acceptable, in trial simulations it is found
that the performance of FLNN is very sensitive to the settings of the
hyper-parameters, such as the learning rate and the number of
hidden layers. It only provides satisfactory results in a quite limited
range of hyper-parameters. This implies that the algorithm is less
robust and thus limited in practical application.
To further explore the performance of BLIFF on different pipes,
 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058
Table 3
Performance of different ANNs in case 2.
FL-DenseNet FL-DenseNet (sigmoid) DenseNet
acc1 (%) 61.23 62.35 30.87
acc5 (%) 98.38 98.58 66.75
we create a new set of test samples with Nte ¼ 1 (i.e. each pipe in
the potential burst district is assumed as burst pipe for once
respectively, i.e. a total of 58 burst events are generated). The
prediction results are shown in Fig. 7a. 37 pipes (i.e. 64% of the 58
pipes, presented in green in Fig. 7a) are accurately targeted with
pre1 ¼ 1. 20 pipes (35%, presented in yellow in Fig. 7a) are included
in the top five likely locations (i.e. pre1 ¼ 0, pre5 ¼ 1). Only one
pipe fails to be correctly located (i.e. pre1 ¼ 0, pre5 ¼ 0), as high-
lighted in red in Fig. 7a. Fig. 7b to d show three examples of bursts
in the three categories mentioned above. The likelihood of burst
happening is shown by the line colour and the true location of the
burst is marked with a star.
As shown in Fig. 7a, pipes with larger diameters (i.e. thicker
lines) or closer to the monitoring meters are accurately predicted in
general. The two large pipes in the top left corner of the district
have large diameters but are not as well predicted. This may be
because the pipes are linked to each other with very few branches,
hence they may yield similar patterns of pressure change when a
burst occurs. Fig. 7b gives an example of a correctly located burst, of
which the pipe with the highest predicted probability is the burst
pipe. Fig. 7c shows another example of pipe burst that falls in the
Fig. 7. (a) Burst localisation results of different pipes; (b) the prediction with the highest probability is the burst pipe; (c) the top five predictions contain the burst pipe while the
first prediction misses; (d) the top five predictions miss the real burst pipe.
9
second category (i.e. pre1 ¼ 0, pre5 ¼ 1). This suggests that the
feature of bursts at small pipes may be harder to distinguish from
FLNN similar, nearby pipes. Fig. 7d shows an example of failed prediction.
42.43
A few pipes near the true burst location are predicted with high
82.22 probabilities of burst. This indicates that the pressure responses at
the monitoring nodes are similar when the burst occurs at
branched pipes or nearby pipes. Nevertheless, BLIFF provides a
good direction though not the accurate location in this case.
There could be more than one burst concurrently happening in
real life. To test the performance of BLIFF with multiple bursts, two
bursts are simultaneously simulated in the potential burst district
with default parameters and at two randomly selected locations.
11600 (equals to Nte  mp ) simulations are conducted as test sam-
ples. It should be noted that FL-DenseNet in this test is trained by
data with only one burst (and default parameters) rather than two.
For each test sample, if at least one of the bursts is correctly
located, the sample is deemed as successfully predicted. An overall
result of all the test samples is acc1 ¼ 29% and acc5 ¼ 77%. It can be
seen that the accuracy of burst localisation decreases when more
than one burst occurs. This is expected as WDNs are nonlinear
systems thus the impact of two bursts is not the addition of two
single bursts, hence the accuracy is low with the model trained
using only single bursts. Three representative cases are illustrated
in Fig. 8. If the bursts happen at pipes with large diameters and are
far from each other (so there are less mutual hydraulic effects), both
of them can be targeted by BLIFF. In the example shown in Fig. 8a,
one burst is successfully located at the pipe with the highest
probability, and another included in the top five likely pipes. Fig. 8b
10 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058

Fig. 8. Burst localisation results when two bursts concurrently happen (a) the prediction with the highest probability is one of the burst pipes; (b) the top five predictions contain
one of the burst pipes; (c) the top five predictions miss both bursts.

shows an example that a large burst and a small burst happen offline BLIFF is more suitable for small networks or those with DMA
simultaneously. In this case, the hydraulic response of the smaller configurations, as the potential burst district can be easily targeted
burst is masked by the larger one, hence BLIFF failed to target it. On (e.g. within a DMA). As the burst time in training data should aim to
the other hand, the localisation accuracy of the larger burst is be the same as actual bursts, a series of FL-DenseNets need to be
affected due to the disturbance of the smaller one. However, the trained with different burst time in the offline BLIFF. As shown in
larger burst pipe is still correctly identified within the top five Fig. 4f, the accuracy is still high if there is a 1 h lag in the actual and
predictions. In the example shown in Fig. 8c, BLIFF incorrectly assumed burst time, hence 24 FL-DenseNets (i.e. burst occurring at
locate the burst to the middle district of the two burst pipes. This is 00:00, 01:00, … and 23:00 respectively) should be sufficient for a
because similar patterns are produced when a burst occurs in the given WDN.
middle of two bursts. However, BLIFF still identifies the correct area The online BLIFF is more suitable for large WDNs without DMAs
of bursts. or where sufficient pressure meters cannot be installed. In these
cases, mobile meters can be employed when a burst is detected.
Concurrently, training of FL-DenseNet is performed on the provided
4. Discussions
potential burst district. Longer time is required for burst local-
isation in the online BLIFF than the offline because extra time is
Although previous studies suggest that pressure values are less
needed to place the mobile meters. However, the online BLIFF is
sensitive to a burst or leak event (Bakker et al., 2014; Mounce et al.,
more economically favourable as no pre-installed meters are
2010b), the proposed BLIFF which is built on the latest deep
required.
learning technology can identify features in a continuous period of
Different parameter settings should be used on different bursts
pressure measurements to accurately locate a burst to one or
to save costs and achieve higher localisation accuracy. Large bursts
several pipes. Based on the two case studies, comprehensive dis-
can be located more easily as the localisation accuracy of bursts
cussions about BLIFF are presented as follows.
with g > 10% is very high as shown in Fig. 4c. Based on the two case
A WDN model needs appropriate parameters such as pipe
studies, a large burst can be deemed as one which causes a pressure
roughness coefficients and nodal demands to represent the real
drop of more than 3 m at any pressure meter or with an outflow of
network accurately. The uncertainty in the parameter values are
over 100L/s. Due to the economic and social consequences of large
especially high in less calibrated models and poorly maintained
bursts, the efficiency of the localisation is more important. If the
networks, which undermines the performance of BLIFF. However,
offline BLIFF is applied, a shorter Td such as 15 or 30 min can be
even assuming considerably large uncertainties in case 1, BLIFF can
chosen to achieve an almost real-time localisation of large bursts.
still provide satisfactory results. This may be attributed to the
For the online BLIFF, in addition to using shorter Td, employing a
following reasons. Firstly, for a network in poor conditions with an
smaller number of mobile meters is also critical as it saves time for
uncalibrated model, larger sC and sq are chosen to generate the
the manual placement of the meters; this is unlikely to undermine
training set, hence it enables FL-DenseNet to learn in a wider
the accuracy of the localisation of large bursts, as satisfactory re-
feature space and cover the features of the network despite the
sults are obtained even with only one meter in case 1 as shown in
large uncertainty. Secondly, as the pressure data are collected for a
Fig. 4e. Besides, the training process can be faster by using small Ntr
continuous period of time rather than a single moment, features at
and training epochs. In comparison, the localisation of smaller
different moments can complement each other, which provides
bursts is harder and needs greater efforts and careful design. Small
more thorough information and the effect of uncertainties can be
bursts have limited disturbance on the WDN hydraulic state and
reduced.
can be easily masked by normally random demand fluctuations.
In practical application, BLIFF can be set up as either ‘offline’ or
Reducing the parameter uncertainties by good maintenance of the
‘online’. In the offline BLIFF, FL-DenseNet is trained in advance.
network and model calibration could be the key to improve the
Moreover, pressure meters can be installed in the optimal locations
accuracy of locating small bursts. Besides, setting more meters and
for a given district even without any bursts (i.e. the first four steps
choosing larger Td also help in improving the accuracy. In addition
in Fig. 1 are done offline). If a burst occurs in this area, the pressure
to small bursts, bursts which happen at branched pipes at the end
records can be extracted and fed to the trained FL-DenseNet. In this
of a network could also have lower localisation accuracy because
case, the efficiency of burst localisation solely depends on the
they are prone to be confused with adjacent bursts. In practice, if
duration of data collection process (Td ). As discussed in Fig. 4d, even
the predictions include the branched end pipes, the nearby pipes
if Td is within 1 h good prediction results can be yielded, hence the
should also be checked.
offline BLIFF can achieve near real-time burst localisation. The
 X. Zhou et al. / Water Research 166 (2019) 115058
5. Conclusions
A novel deep learning framework called BLIFF is proposed in this
study for accurate localisation of pipe bursts within a potential
burst district, based on additional real-time pressure monitoring at
limited places for a short period. In the framework, FL-DenseNet, a
modified version of the popular deep learning algorithm DenseNet,
is employed to effectively extract the features in pressure signals in
WDNs. Procedures are also incorporated in BLIFF for optimising the
locations for the additional monitoring. BLIFF is tested on two case
studies and the key findings are summarised below.
1) Accurate predictions can be made based on pressure signals
using the newly developed deep learning algorithm FL-
DenseNet. The pressure meters are cheaper than flow meters
and easier to install, indicating the practicality of BLIFF for real-
life applications.
2) BLIFF is trained using the data generated from hydraulic models,
but is found to be robust to high model uncertainties.
3) The one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis shows that the prediction
accuracy is high under a wide range of parameter settings of
BLIFF, highlighting its robustness for effective burst localisation.
Although a few key uncertainty sources in modelling have been
considered, further study is recommended to examine the effects of
other uncertainty sources such as inaccurate pump curves, un-
known valve states, and pipe and node elevations. The Wagner's
formulas and orifice outflow equation are used in this study to
simulate a burst with PDA, however, other burst simulation
methods can be investigated for improving the performance of
BLIFF.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by National Key Research
and Development Plan (Grant No. 2016YFC0400602), National
Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51678425,
51808396), and the UK Royal Society through an industry fellow-
ship to the last author (Ref: IF160108). Xiao Zhou's visiting at the
University of Exeter is sponsored by China Scholarship Council
(201806260130).
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