Forecasting operational demand for an urban water supply zone

A time series forecasting model of hourly water consumption 24 h in advance for an urban zone within the Melbourne (Australia) water supply system is developed. The model comprises two modules—daily and hourly. The daily module is formulated as a set of equations representing the effects of three factors on water use namely seasonality, climatic correlation, and autocorrelation. The hourly module is developed to disaggregate the estimated daily consumption into hourly consumption. The models were calibrated using hourly and daily data for a 6 year period, and independently validated over an additional seven month period. Over this latter period, the hourly forecast model accounted for 66% of the variance in the peak hourly water consumption with a standard error of 162 l/p/d.