Spatiotemporal Correlation Feature Spaces to Support Anomaly Detection in Water Distribution Networks

Monitoring disruptions to water distribution dynamics are essential to detect leakages, signal fraudlent and deviant consumptions, amongst other events of interest. State-of-the-art methods to detect anomalous behavior from flowarate and pressure signal show limited degrees of success as they generally neglect the simultaneously rich spatial and temporal content of signals produced by the multiple sensors placed at different locations of a water distribution network (WDN). This work shows that it is possible to (1) describe the dynamics of a WDN through spatiotemporal correlation analysis of pressure and volumetric flowrate sensors, and (2) analyze disruptions on the expected correlation to detect burst leakage dynamics and additional deviant phenomena. Results gathered from Portuguese WDNs reveal that the proposed shift from raw signal views into correlation-based views offers a simplistic and more robust means to handle the irregularity of consumption patterns and the heterogeneity of leakage profiles (both in terms of burst volume and location). We further show that the disruption caused by leakages can be detected shortly after the burst, highlighting the actionability of the proposed correlation-based principles for anomaly detection in heterogeneous and georeferenced time series. The computational approach is provided as an open-source tool available at GitHub