Prediction of municipal water production in touristic Mecca City in Saudi Arabia using neural networks

Accurate forecast of municipal water production is critically important for arid and oil rich countries such as Saudi Arabia which depend on costly desalination plants to satisfy the growing water demand. Achieving the desired prediction accuracy is a challenging task since the forecast model should take into consideration a variety of factors such as economic development, climate conditions and population growth. The task is further complicated given that Mecca city is visited regularly by large numbers during specific months in the year due to religious reasons. This study develops a neural network model for forecasting the monthly and annual water demand for Mecca city, Saudi Arabia. The proposed model used historic records of water production and estimated visitors’ distribution to calibrate a neural network model for water demand forecast. The explanatory variables included annually-varying variables such as household income, persons per household, and city population, along with monthly-varying variables such as expected number of visitors each month and maximum monthly temperature. The NN prediction outperforms that of a regular econometric model. The latter is adjusted such that it can provide monthly and annual predictions.