Hydroinformatics, data mining and maintenance of UK water networks

This paper introduces hydroinformatics, a discipline that has strong ancestry in the computational sciences and artificial intelligence, as a way forward for water network management and maintenance in particular. Within hydroinformatics, geographic information systems and data mining (artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms specifically) are the new technologies with probably the widest applicability to the water industry. This paper introduces basic concepts of hydroinformatics and data mining, explains the process by which they may be applied and describes basic technologies with their advantages and disadvantages.