Unsupervised Online Detection of Pipe Blockages and Leakages in Water Distribution Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Jin, Malialis, Kleanthis, Vrachimis, Stelios G., Polycarpou, Marios M.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Jin
Malialis, Kleanthis
Vrachimis, Stelios G.
Polycarpou, Marios M.
author_facet Li, Jin
Malialis, Kleanthis
Vrachimis, Stelios G.
Polycarpou, Marios M.
contents Water Distribution Networks (WDNs), critical to public well-being and economic stability, face challenges such as pipe blockages and background leakages, exacerbated by operational constraints such as data non-stationarity and limited labeled data. This paper proposes an unsupervised, online learning framework that aims to detect two types of faults in WDNs: pipe blockages, modeled as collective anomalies, and background leakages, modeled as concept drift. Our approach combines a Long Short-Term Memory Variational Autoencoder (LSTM-VAE) with a dual drift detection mechanism, enabling robust detection and adaptation under non-stationary conditions. Its lightweight, memory-efficient design enables real-time, edge-level monitoring. Experiments on two realistic WDNs show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines in detecting anomalies and adapting to recurrent drift, demonstrating its effectiveness in unsupervised event detection for dynamic WDN environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16336
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised Online Detection of Pipe Blockages and Leakages in Water Distribution Networks
Li, Jin
Malialis, Kleanthis
Vrachimis, Stelios G.
Polycarpou, Marios M.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Water Distribution Networks (WDNs), critical to public well-being and economic stability, face challenges such as pipe blockages and background leakages, exacerbated by operational constraints such as data non-stationarity and limited labeled data. This paper proposes an unsupervised, online learning framework that aims to detect two types of faults in WDNs: pipe blockages, modeled as collective anomalies, and background leakages, modeled as concept drift. Our approach combines a Long Short-Term Memory Variational Autoencoder (LSTM-VAE) with a dual drift detection mechanism, enabling robust detection and adaptation under non-stationary conditions. Its lightweight, memory-efficient design enables real-time, edge-level monitoring. Experiments on two realistic WDNs show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines in detecting anomalies and adapting to recurrent drift, demonstrating its effectiveness in unsupervised event detection for dynamic WDN environments.
title Unsupervised Online Detection of Pipe Blockages and Leakages in Water Distribution Networks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16336