Temporal Water Demand Calculation Model

Understanding demand for water services is critical in designing for the vulnerability and sustainability of water infrastructure systems. Typically, providers collect demand information from individual customers on a monthly or bimonthly schedule, but many analyses need to occur at intervals of minutes to hours at the water network level. Such data needs require techniques for the spatiotemporal manipulation of metered data for use in infrastructure models.

This map shows the results for the Chicago area of a water demand tool built in ArcGIS Desktop that can synthesize and manipulate demand data for use in infrastructure models. The tool was built within Visual Basic .NET and relies on data describing the type and location of customers in the residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional classes. The intensity and time pattern of use are drawn from the water use literature. The resulting model incorporates the unique geographical locations of water demand as well as the diurnal use patterns of the water customers. Predicted demands and patterns may be exported for use with common water distribution modeling software packages such as EPANET.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer, is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract W-70405_ENG-36. By acceptance of this article, the publisher recognizes that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution or to allow others to do so for U.S. government purposes. Los Alamos National Laboratory requests that the publisher identify this article as work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy. Los Alamos National Laboratory strongly supports academic freedom and a researcher’s right to publish; as an institution, however, the laboratory does not endorse the viewpoint of a publication or guarantee its technical correctness.