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Urban water demand prediction based on climate change is always challenging for water utilities because of the uncertainty that results from a sudden rise in water demand due to stochastic patterns of climatic factors. For this purpose, a novel combined methodology including, firstly, data pre-processing techniques were employed to decompose the time series of water and climatic factors by using empirical mode decomposition and identifying the best model input via tolerance to avoid multi-collinearity. Second, the artificial neural network (ANN) model was optimised by an up-to-date slime mould algorithm (SMA-ANN) to predict the medium term of the stochastic signal of monthly urban water demand. Ten climatic factors over 16 years were used to simulate the stochastic signal of water demand. The results reveal that SMA outperforms a multi-verse optimiser and backtracking search algorithm based on error scale. The performance of the hybrid model SMA-ANN is better than ANN (stand-alone) based on the range of statistical criteria. Generally, this methodology yields accurate results with a coefficient of determination of 0.9 and a mean absolute relative error of 0.001. This study can assist local water managers to efficiently manage the present water system and plan extensions to accommodate the increasing water demand.

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