Abstract:As a core part of protecting water quality safety in water distribution systems, contamination event detection requires high accuracy. Previously, temporal analysis-based methods for single sensor stations have shown limited performance as they fail to consider spatial information. Besides, abundant historical data from multiple stations are still underexploited in causal relationship modelling. In this paper, a contamination event detection method is proposed, in which both temporal and spatial information from multi-stations in water distribution systems are used. The causal relationship between upstream and downstream stations is modelled by Bayesian Network, using the historical water quality data and hydraulic data. Then, the spatial abnormal probability for one station is obtained by comparing its current causal relationship with the established model. Meanwhile, temporal abnormal probability is obtained by conventional methods, such as an Autoregressive (AR) or threshold model for the same station. The integrated probability that is calculated employed temporal and spatial probabilities using Logistic Regression to determine the final detection result. The proposed method is tested over two networks and its detection performance is evaluated against results obtained from traditional methods using only temporal analysis. Results indicate that the proposed method shows higher accuracy due to its increased information from both temporal and spatial dimensions.