WaterAdmin: Orchestrating Community Water Distribution Optimization via AI Agents

TL;DR

WaterAdmin is a bi-level AI framework combining LLMs and optimization to adaptively manage community water systems amid dynamic conditions, improving reliability and energy efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces WaterAdmin, a novel bi-level AI-agent framework that integrates LLM-based context understanding with optimization control for water systems.

Findings

WaterAdmin maintains pressure reliability effectively.

It reduces energy consumption in dynamic scenarios.

The framework outperforms traditional methods in adaptive control.

Abstract

We study the operation of community water systems, where pumps and valves must be scheduled to reliably meet water demands while minimizing energy consumption. While existing optimization-based methods are effective under well-modeled environments, real-world community scenarios exhibit highly dynamic contexts-such as human activities, weather variations, etc-that significantly affect water demand patterns and operational targets across different zones. Traditional optimization approaches struggle to aggregate and adapt to such heterogeneous and rapidly evolving contextual information in real time. While Large Language Model (LLM) agents offer strong capabilities for understanding heterogeneous community context, they are not suitable for directly producing reliable real-time control actions. To address these challenges, we propose a bi-level AI-agent-based framework, WaterAdmin, which integrates LLM-based community context abstraction at the upper level with optimization-based operational control at the lower level. This design leverages the complementary strengths of both paradigms to enable adaptive and reliable operation. We implement WaterAdmin on the hydraulic simulation platform EPANET and demonstrate superior performance in maintaining pressure reliability and reducing energy consumption under highly dynamic community contexts.