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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water

Sec. Water and Built Environment

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frwa.2025.1693893

This article is part of the Research TopicUrban Water Network Planning and Management: Perspectives and Solutions in the Transition Towards Smart Systems from the City to the End-use ScaleView all 4 articles

Modelling minimum night consumption as a function of long-run average outflow to users and applications to real world case studies

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Universita degli Studi di Pavia Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile ed Architettura, Pavia, Italy
  • 2Universita degli Studi di Ferrara Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Ferrara, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

As accurate monitoring and mitigation of water leakage are essential in the context of smart and resilient cities, this paper proposes a novel methodology for modelling users’ minimum night consumption (MNC), a key parameter in the estimation of district leakage levels. Unlike traditional models, which relate MNC to the number of users supplied by the network district, a new model with a bounded and more interpretable coefficient is conceived to introduce and evaluate the dependence of MNC on the yearly average user outflow, which can be evaluated based on long-run aggregate billed consumption. A methodology is proposed to characterize MNC starting from smart metering data of hourly user water consumption, which are progressively aggregated and analysed at the hour of minimum consumption for the district. Applications to three case studies in Italy, each with distinct characteristics, demonstrate that the novel methodology is beneficial. In fact, the results show that the linear model expressing MNC as a function of the yearly average user outflow fits data better than the traditional model, at increasing aggregation levels.

Keywords: leakage, Minimum Night Consumption, residential users, Non-residential users, Smartmeter, water distribution systems

Received: 27 Aug 2025; Accepted: 23 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Giudicianni, Mazzoni, Marsili, Alvisi and Creaco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Enrico Creaco, creaco@unipv.it

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