Correlating water consumption behaviour with billing, infra-structure and social demographic factors

Abstract

This paper describes a study of residential consumption characterization at the district metering area (DMA) level, taking into consideration billing, socio-demographic and infrastructure-related factors. The article describes the methodology used and presents the results of its application to a set of 20 network districts in the Lisbon (Portugal) metropolitan region, over a period of 12 months of continuous monitoring, including the analysis of consumption scenarios; the estimation of daily consumption patterns; and the study of the most relevant factors that influence consumption. The modelling of consumption patterns involved the analysis of large consumers, the identification of consumption scenarios and the estimation of daily consumption patterns. Multivariate statistical analyses were carried out to obtain factors and identify the correlations with consumption statistics. The main correlations with daily, weekly and seasonal statistics are shown.