Any utility facing rapid growth and expensive capital improvements
needs accurate water demand forecasts for planning.
For a smaller suburban utility, the planning effort is constrained
by limited staff and financial resources. Although smaller
utilities may understand the benefits of using multiple regression
for water demand forecasting, they may instead decide to use
conventional trend analysis or unit water demand analysis. This
decision is often based on the belief that multiple regression is
difficult to implement, requires staff experts on statistics, and is
too time-consuming.
This study was undertaken to eliminate these misperceptions.
It shows that: regression-based water demand models
are easy to develop using features available in most spreadsheet
and statistical software packages; and, the time to develop a
model can be reduced from days to minutes if a systematic
model construction procedure such as stepwise regression
is used.
Although good information is available on using multiple
regression analysis to investigate historic water demand, little
information is available on the merits of stepwise regression
and/or other systematic model construction techniques. This
article can help make regression-based water demand analysis
more accessible to water suppliers with limited resources and
staff expertise. Includes 10 references, tables, figures.
| Edition : | Vol. 94 - No. 10 |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 500 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 11 |
| Published : | 10/01/2002 |
