Identification of the hydraulic model from operational measurements for supervisory pressure control

The operational pressure control is a cost‐effective way to leakage reduction and many pressure control methods and algorithms have been developed. Whilst the pressure control algorithm is model‐based, the hydraulic model of the considered distribution network is not always available. Therefore, this paper will focus on the development of an aggregated hydraulic model of the network considered, in particular, identification of a leakage enhanced model using the operational measurements or the available historical data. This will enable a pressure optimisation algorithm to calculate the optimal pressure schedules for the implementation of a pressure control scheme. The identification problem is formulated as a parameter estimation problem in this paper and a least‐square based method is derived for estimating the parameters in the model. A case study provided by a UK water company is performed to illustrate the use of the method and the identification results from real operational data are presented.