Back-propagation artificial neural networks for water supply pipeline model

Water supply pipelines are the lifelines of a city. When pipelines burst, the burst site is difficult to locate by traditional methods such as manual tools or only by watching. In this paper, the burst site was identified using back-propagation (BP) artificial neural networks (ANN). The study is based on an indoor urban water supply model experiment. The key to appling BP ANN is to optimize the ANN's topological structure and learning parameters. This paper presents the optimizing method for a 3-layer BP neural network's topological structure and its learning parameters-learning ratio and the momentum factor. The indoor water supply pipeline model experimental results show that BP ANNs can be used to locate the burst point in urban water supply systems. The topological structure and learning parameters were optimized using the experimental results.