The Use of Cluster Analysis to Evaluate the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Daily Water Demand Patterns

Abstract

Proper determination of unitary water demand and diurnal distribution of water consumption (water consumption histogram) provides the basis for designing, dimensioning, and all analyses of water supply networks. It is important in the case of mathematical modelling of flows in the water supply network, particularly during the determination of nodal water demands in the context of Extended Period Simulation (EPS). Considering the above, the analysis of hourly water consumption in selected apartment buildings was performed to verify the justification of the application of grouping by means of k-means clustering. The article presents a detailed description of the adopted methodology, as well as the obtained results in the form of synthetic distributions of hourly water consumption, and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on their change.