False Negative/Positive Issues in Contaminant Source Identification for Water-Distribution Systems

Abstract

A contaminant source identification (CSI) methodology for water distribution systems is intended to identify possible events (i.e., intrusion nodes, times, duration, and mass rate). The methodology has to be both rapid and able to incorporate uncertainties when identifying possible intrusion nodes (PINs). Identification of PINs has two major issues: the false-negative rate (failure to identify the true ingress location) and the false-positive issue (falsely identifying a location that is not the true ingress location). A data-mining procedure is described and applied, which involves mining an offline-built database to select PINs that possess first-detection times within