A statistically based fault detection and diagnosis approach for non-residential building water distribution systems

Large non-residential buildings can contain complex and often inefficient water distribution systems. As requirements for water increase due to water scarcity and industrialization, it has become increasingly important to effectively detect and diagnose faults in water distribution systems in large buildings. In many cases, if water supply is not impacted, faults in water distribution systems can go unnoticed. This can lead to unnecessary increases in water usage and associated energy due to pumping, treating, and heating water. The majority of fault detection and diagnosis studies in the water sector are limited to municipal water supply and leakage detection. The application of detection and diagnosis for faults in building water networks remains largely unexplored and the ability to identify and distinguish between routine and non-routine water usage at this scale remains a challenge. This study using case-study data, presents the application of principal component analysis and a multi-class support vector machine to detect and classify faults for non-residential building water networks. In the absence of a process model (which is typical for such water distribution systems), principal component analysis is proposed as a data-driven fault detection technique for building water distribution systems for the first time herein. Hotelling T2-statistics and Q-statistics were employed to detect abnormality within incoming data, and a multi-class support vector machine was trained for fault classification. Despite the relatively limited training data available from the case-study (which would reflect the situation in many buildings), meaningful faults were detected, and the technique proved successful in discriminating between various types of faults in the water distribution system. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is compared to a univariate threshold technique by comparison of their respective performance in the detection of faults that occurred in the case-study site. The results demonstrate the promising capabilities of the proposed fault detection and diagnosis approach. Such a strategy could provide a robust methodology that can be applied to buildings to reduce inefficient water use, reducing their life-cycle carbon footprint.