A Benchmark for Physics-informed Machine Learning of Chlorine Concentration States in Water Distribution Networks

Ensuring high-quality drinking water is a critical responsibility of water utilities, with chlorine being the main disinfectant typically used. Accurate estimation of chlorine concentrations in the dynamic environment of water distribution networks (WDNs) is essential to ensure safe water supply. This work introduces a comprehensive and carefully created benchmark for training and evaluation of chlorine concentration estimation methodologies in WDNs. The benchmark includes a diverse dataset of 18,000 scenarios of the widely studied 'Hanoi', 'Net1', and the more recent and complex 'CY-DBP' water networks, featuring various chlorine injection patterns to capture diverse physical dynamics. To provide baseline evaluations, we propose and evaluate two neural surrogate models for chlorine state estimation: a physics-informed Graph Neural Network (GNN) and a physics-guided Recurrent Neural Network (RNN).