ICT Solutions for Efficient Water Resources Management
Water is one of the key resources for mankind. Particularly in densely populated areas, efficient management of water supply is key to be able to sustain the growing human population and address the growing water demand. Today, water distribution networks often suffer from a demand-supply mismatch and water losses and wastage due to leakages. Further, energy costs comprise a significant share of the operational expenses of water utilities. Solutions existing today are inadequate as they do not provide capabilities for fine-granular, real-time monitoringand optimization, and management of the water supply based on customer needs and energy costs. Solutions available in the market today are not interoperable and extendable.
ICeWater aims to address the above issues using a holistic approach to manage the “water energy nexus”. In particular, ICeWater combines sophisticated ICT solutions to provide real-time monitoring of water supply and demand. Based on such sensor data, advanced decision support systems facilitate optimization of the water grid network operation (pumping schedules, pressure etc.). The envisaged demand management and consumption information system is accessible online to all relevant stakeholders and allows dynamic pricing schemes with nudge-pricing to motivate behavioral change in customers causing critical consumption patterns. Innovative services for asset management, such as leakage detection and leakage localization will reduce water waste. To achieve this, novel networking concepts (protocols, management of virtualized network resources) are required to enable better data and information flow management, network resources management and sharing in a service oriented architecture. The information gathered with such services allow a better understanding of the consumers and the effectiveness of water resource management and advanced metering and pricing schemes.
The I-SENSE Team will lead the communication system developments and will particularly implement the gateway system, utilize the communication interfaces and also work on the secure communication architecture. Further to these, I-SENSE will significantly contribute in the design of the multi-layer communication architecture and routing and overall system architecture. I-SENSE will also con-tribute to pilot activities and clustering with other projects and initiatives.
The project is co-funded and supported
by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme.