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Systematic Review ? AI-assigned paper type based on the abstract. Classification may not be perfect — flag errors using the feedback button. Tier 1 ? Systematic review or meta-analysis. Synthesizes findings across many studies. Strongest evidence. Environmental Sources Food & Water Human Health Effects Remediation Sign in to save

Machine Learning to Access and Ensure Safe Drinking Water Supply: A Systematic Review

2024 5 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 65 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Feng Feng, Yuanxun Zhang, Zhenru Chen, Jianyuan Ni, Yuan Feng, Yuan Feng, Yunchao Xie, Chiqian Zhang

Summary

This systematic review examines machine learning applications for monitoring, predicting, and controlling drinking water quality, covering contaminants from disinfection byproducts to biofilms and antimicrobial resistance genes. While not specifically about microplastics, the ML approaches described are directly applicable to detecting and predicting microplastic contamination in engineered water systems.

Study Type Review

Drinking water is essential to public health and socioeconomic growth. Therefore, assessing and ensuring drinking water supply is a critical task in modern society. Conventional approaches to analyzing and controlling drinking water quality are labor-intensive and costly with a low throughput. Machine learning (ML) is an alternative, promising technique to assess and ensuring safe drinking water supply. Existing reviews have summarized the applications of ML in safe drinking water supply from different aspects. However, a state-of-the-art, comprehensive review is missing that focuses on applying ML to monitor, simulate, predict, and control drinking water quality, especially in municipal engineered water systems. This review, therefore, critically compiles the applications of ML in assessing and ensuring water quality in engineered water systems. To be comprehensive, we also cover the applications of ML in other drinking-water-related settings such as water sources and water purification processes. We explain the basic mechanics and workflows of ML, focusing on the applications of ML to access and control key factors or etiologies in drinking water from the physical, chemical, and microbiological aspects. Those factors or etiologies affect water quality and public health, such as water pipeline failures, disinfectant by-products, heavy metals, opportunistic pathogens, biofilms, and antimicrobial resistance genes. We then illustrate the distribution of ML models across research topics in safe drinking water supply. Finally, we discuss the challenges and outlooks for the applications of machine learning in safe drinking water supply. This is the first review summarizing the feasibility and applications of ML in assessing and ensuring water quality in municipal engineered water systems as well as other related water environments.

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