A stochastic approach for the water demand of residential end users

Reliable hydraulic modeling of water distribution networks requires a deep knowledge of water demand. In the past few years, technical literature has been enriched with many contributions aimed at realistically representing the residential water demand of end users. The proposed models generally represent water demand through rectangular pulses, describing demand as the sum of the requests from single domestic appliances. This paper proposes a new stochastic model - Overall Pulse (OP) - which allows the generation of the overall domestic demand as displayed at the house water meter. The proposed model allows the taking into account of the randomness of the arrivals rate and the demand persistence phenomenon. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been tested, comparing the generated data series with those measured for residences with different lifestyles. The generation of the synthetic data series has been made by means of the OP model with the Monte Carlo method.