cs.LGMar 25, 2026

The impact of sensor placement on graph-neural-network-based leakage detection

Authors: J. J. H. van Gemert, V. Breschi, D. R. Yntema, K. J. Keesman, M. Lazar

Organizations: Control Systems Group, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands · Wetsus, Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Water Technology, 8900MA Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. · Mathematical and Statistical Methods – Biometris, Wageningen University, 6708PB Wageningen, the Netherlands

Abstract

Sensor placement for leakage detection in water distribution networks is an important and practical challenge for water utilities. Recent work has shown that graph neural networks can estimate and predict pressures and detect leaks, but their performance strongly depends on the available sensor measurements and configurations. In this paper, we investigate how sensor placement influences the performance of GNN-based leakage detection. We propose a novel PageRank-Centrality-based sensor placement method and demonstrate that it substantially impacts reconstruction, prediction, and leakage detection on the EPANET Net1.

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