A Software Tool for Non-Revenue Water Calculations in Urban Water Systems in Conjunction with Hydraulic and GIS Models

This paper introduces a procedure to calculate the non-revenue water in urban water systems. A software is developed to determine the components of apparent and real losses. Identification of these parameters is so important especially in countries with critical water resources situation. Evaluation of the apparent losses components has the same importance as leakage, in countries like Iran which all customers are metered. This paper proposes a methodology to calculate the non-physical part of NRW in detail. The software routine also evaluates the leakage performance indicators based on the IWA terminology. Furthermore, this NRW software can be linked to a hydraulic model to determine the network leakage at each node and pipe, by a revolutionary methodology. In addition, it has the ability of integrating with geographical information systems for further network analyses and linkage of network attribute data with map. The results help the decision makers to select the best scheme for reduction of apparent losses and leakage. Finally, the proposed methodology is applied for NRW calculations in one of the Iranian cities and its advantages are highlighted.