Patent ID: 8635051

Claim:
A method for leakage detection in a hydraulic network comprising loading a hydraulic simulation model corresponding to a real-world hydraulic network in a hydraulic modeling and simulation application executing on a computer system, the hydraulic simulation model configured to represent leakages as pressure dependent emitter flow at selected nodes identified as leakage nodes; receiving optimization criteria including a specified maximum of possible leakage nodes; generating, by a genetic algorithm (GA), a plurality of trial solutions for an optimization, each trial solution representing locations for leakage nodes and corresponding emitter coefficients; performing a hydraulic analysis for the trial solutions to generate model-simulated results; comparing the model-simulated results to field-observed data for the real-world hydraulic network and generating goodness-of-fit values, each goodness-of-fit value based on a combination of a calculated head difference between model-simulated hydraulic grade and field-observed hydraulic grade and a calculated flow difference between model-simulated flow and field-observed flow; repeating the generating, performing and comparing to attempt to minimize the head difference and the flow difference, until a particular goodness-of-fit value is achieved or a maximum number of iterations is reached; and displaying, in a user interface of the computer system, predicted locations for leakage nodes from a particular selected trial solution.