Automated Household Water End-Use Disaggregation through Rule-Based Methodology

Application of smart meters to the residential sector can provide insight into where and when water is used, thereby enabling utilities to achieve an efficient management of water distribution systems. Moreover, detailed information about domestic water use can be obtained by disaggregating smart meter data collected at the household inlet point. In this paper, a rule-based, automated methodology for disaggregating household water-use data into end uses is presented. The methodology is applicable to 1-min temporal resolution data, whose granularity is slightly lower than the one generally used in other methodologies, potentially allowing it to be applied to several contexts in the field of water-use monitoring. The methodology was set up and validated with data collected for 2 months through intrusive monitoring of four households in Bologna, Italy, and represents a pioneering case in which disaggregation performance is directly assessed by the comparison against data collected at each end use. The results obtained showed that the methodology enables household water use to be efficiently disaggregated even if detailed information about end-use features is not available.