Metrological State Estimation Approach for Real-Time Water Volume Meter Errors Control

Apparent losses is a major issue in many water distribution systems, which are hardly assessed due to their complexity, especially those associated with metering errors. Furthermore, individual evaluation of every water meter error is a costly and time-consuming task. This work presents a novel metrological state estimation approach (MSEA) for real-time water volume meter errors control. The proposed methodology is primarily applicable in a collective irrigation system (CIS) or other network where the flow rates at any monitored outflow fall inside a range to assume water meter errors as quasi-constants. The methodology enables further benefit from the advanced metering infrastructures (AMI) in order to apply state estimation (SE) techniques and automatically control the metrological status of all water meters within the network. Therefore, water meters with significant accuracy errors are detected. The application and detection capacity of the proposed method are studied by means of illustrative examples with synthetic but realistic measurement generations.