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Prediction of urban water consumption can help to improve the performance of water distribution systems. Despite the obvious presence of uncertainty in measurements and in assumed model types/structures, most of the existing water consumption prediction models are developed and used in a deterministic context. Methods for more realistic assessment of parameter and model prediction uncertainties have begun to appear in literature only recently. A novel application of the Shuffled Complex Evolution Metropolis algorithm (SCEM-UA) for the calibration of a water consumption prediction model is proposed here. The model is applied to a case study of the city of Catania (Italy) with the aim to predict daily water consumption. The SCEM-UA algorithm is used to calibrate the parameters of the artificial neural network based prediction model and in turn to determine the associated parameter and model prediction uncertainties. The results obtained using the SCEM-UA ANN approach were compared to the corresponding results obtained using other predictive models developed recently by the authors of the paper. When compared to the these models, the SCEM-UA ANN based water consumption prediction model shows similar predictive capability but also the ability to identify simultaneously the prediction uncertainty bounds associated with the posterior distribution of the parameter estimates.

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