Abstract: The objective of system monitoring is mainly for diagnoses or forecasting. Monitoring points should be highly sensitive, and their outputs should have low correlation to avoid information redundant, therefore the obtained information is more useful in reliable diagnoses or forecasts. To maximize usefulness of the monitoring information, an effective independence method, a maximization criterion of Fisher information matrix, and correlation coefficients are used to determine the monitoring points based on the sensitivity analysis of water supply network. Finally, a water supply network is analyzed, and schemes of the three methods compared with that of the traditional cluster analysis method. It is shown that the monitoring points and their corresponding monitoring areas can be determined using the method of monitoring point locating based on correlation coefficients. The method is more simple, stable and efficient, so it is better than other methods.

Key words: information maximization criterion, monitoring point locating, sensitivity, water supply network