Abstract: No universal water security evaluation method is available today due to regional differences in
evaluation indexes system. Differences exist in the unit and dimension of each water security index and a
large difference appears between different indexes even on the same grade. This article presents a universal
probabilistic neural network (PNN) for water safety assessment based on a reference value selection for all
the indicators and an appropriate standardization transformation formula. This model can overcome the
limitation of traditional PNN, and it adopted a standardized PNN in the water security assessment for
Shandong province and other five provinces in China. Results show the same assessment results of
normalized PNN with other methods. The new model, free of the restriction in the total number of
evaluation indexes, provides a new approach to development of universal and simplified evaluation models.