vvEPA
               Event  Detection  System Challenge

 Background
 The Water Security initiative is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program that addresses the risk
 of intentional contamination of drinking water distribution systems. Initiated in response to Homeland
 Security Presidential Directive 9, the overall goal is to design and deploy contamination warning systems
 for drinking water utilities.  A contamination warning system is a proactive approach to monitoring for
 contamination through deployment of advanced technologies and enhanced  surveillance activities to
 collect, integrate, analyze, and communicate information.

 Water quality monitoring is  one component of a contamination warning system and consists of a network
 of monitoring stations throughout a drinking water distribution system. Each station contains a suite of
 sensors that measure standard water quality parameters such as chlorine, total organic carbon  (TOC) and
 pH. These parameters have  been  shown to change in the presence of many contaminants. However, the
 normal variability in distribution system water quality, coupled with the large amount of data, makes it a
 challenge to successfully detect transient contamination incidents. The proposed solution to this problem
 relies on event detection systems (EDS) containing algorithms of various degrees  of sophistication to
 detect anomalous conditions.

 The Challenge
 As work in this field has been  fairly limited to date, this study seeks to identify a wide  range of EDSs
 currently available for event detection, challenge developers  to optimize their EDSs using a variety of
 available data, and quantify performance of submitted EDSs over a wide range of  detection scenarios.
 The basic format of the challenge will be:
   * EPA will provide several months of water quality, alarm, and operational data from  5-6 monitoring
 stations from several utilities.
   * Using the provided data, each participating team will  develop and train an EDS to reliably detect
 anomalies at each station while producing few false alarms.
   * EPA will test each EDS on normal utility data, as well as datasets with a variety of contamination
 events superimposed on the  data. Each station will be analyzed individually.

 Participants
 Potential participants  include researchers, software  developers, product vendors, or anyone else with
 software capable  of detecting  anomalous conditions in  drinking water. New EDS techniques  can be
 developed, or existing anomaly  detection or signal processing algorithms from other fields can be adapted
 to drinking water. The objective is to compare algorithms with a wide variety of analytical approaches.

 Schedule
 The schedule of events  for the Event Detection System Challenge is outlined below. These dates are
 subject to change.
Date
June 30, 2008
July 1 - October 1,
2008
October 1, 2008
December 1, 2008
Spring 2009
Summer 2009
Event
Test plan finalized and e-mailed to interested
registration begins
All necessary materials, including training data
application, are provided to registered teams
parties, participant
and an interface
Final day to register
Last day to submit EDSs & associated materials
Initial distribution of results to participants
Initial public presentation of results
                 Water Security Division  | June 2008  | www.epa.qov/watersecuritv

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c/EPA
Event Detection System Challenge                                 page 2
 For Additional Information
 For more information or to request a copy  of the challenge rules, please  contact Katie  Umberg
 (umberg.katie@epa.gov').

 More information on the Water Security Initiative and the contamination warning system concept can be
 found at http://cfpub.epa.gov/safewater/watersecuritv/.
                 Water Security Division |  June 2008 | www.epa.qov/watersecuritv

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