Lessons learned from the Battle of Water Demand Forecasting

“They say that in competitions, you either win or you learn. While we may have taken second place in the Battle of the Water Demand Forecasting, we learned a lot. In this blog post, we’ll share our key takeaways from four days of sessions about the solutions presented during the recent 3rd International Joint Conference on Water Distribution Systems Analysis & Computing and Control for the Water Industry (WDSA/CCWI), held in Ferrara, Italy, between the 1st and 4th of July.
A highlight of the conference and a continuing long-standing tradition in the field, the Battle of Water Demand Forecasting (BWDF) aimed to compare the effectiveness of various methods for short-term (one-week ahead) urban water demand forecasting. This competition challenged participants to predict weekly water usage patterns with a hourly resolution across real District Metered Areas (DMAs, metered parts of the city’s water network), using different metrics and covering various periods of the year. The method that proved most robust across all these aspects was crowned the winner. The detailed instructions and data remain available on the website, serving as a powerful benchmark for future solutions addressing this complex and crucial task in urban water management.
Our team’s solution is the result of a strong collaborative effort. We formed a multidisciplinary team that brought together expertise from Bielefeld University, KIOS Research Centre, Athens University of Economics and Business, and our own organization. The collaboration was born during one of the recurrent in-person meetings of the ERC-funded Water-Futures project (from here the team’s name), highlighting the importance of these gatherings.”

(Citation: Zanutto, D. – Lessons learned from the Battle of Water Demand Forecasting – KWR-Blog (2024)23 juli)