International Journal of Computing and Artificial Intelligence 2020; 1(1): 01-03
E-ISSN: 2707-658X
P-ISSN: 2707-6571
IJCAI 2020; 1(1): 01-03
Received: 01-11-2019
Accepted: 05-12-2019
K Santha Sheela
Dept. Computer Science and
Engineering, Velammal College
of Engineering and
Technology, Madurai, Tamil
Nadu, India
Deepan Chakravarthi AV
Dept. Computer Science and
Engineering, Velammal College
of Engineering and
Technology, Madurai, Tamil
Nadu, India
Corresponding Author:
K Santha Sheela
Dept. Computer Science and
Engineering, Velammal College
of Engineering and
Technology, Madurai, Tamil
Nadu, India
Effective water management processes using IOT
K Santha Sheela and Deepan Chakravarthi AV
Abstract
Water is a vital resource for life, and its management is a key issue nowadays. Information and
communications technology systems for water control are currently facing interoperability problems
due to the lack of support of standardization in monitory and control equipment. This problem affects
various processes in water management, such as water consumption, distribution, system identification
and equipment maintenance. OPC UA (Object linking and embedding for process control unified
architecture) is a platform independent service-oriented architecture for the control of processes in the
logistic and manufacturing sectors. Water treatment is any process that improves the quality of water to
make it more acceptable for a specific end-use. The end use may be drinking, industrial water supply,
irrigation, river flow maintenance, water recreation or many other uses, including being safely returned
to the environment. Water treatment removes contaminants and undesirable components, or reduces
their concentration so that the water becomes fit for its desired end-use. This treatment is crucial to
human health and allows humans to benefit from both drinking and irrigation use.
Keywords: water management, irrigation, OPC UA, internet of things
1. Introduction
The world today has countless global threats and challenges and so has the global water
industry. There are many agents that are responsible for these challenges and crises. These
include population growth, the pollution and the influence of many pollutants that exist in
the system. Other factors include migration, issues that contribute to water reuse, and many
other agents. Also, part of the deal includes water rights. Having access to water and water
resources is one of the fundamental rights that humans should have. Also. Using these rights
in an efficient way is very critical. In many recent times, the World Economic Forum has
stated that the environmental risks placed before any economic risks. The crisis with water is
amidst the top three global risks that are present in the world today. Experts say that by the
year 2025, around 70 percent of the world population will be living in the cities. Half of this
population that is living in the cities will suffer from a scarcity of water and related
problems. The UN reports suggest that around 2.0 billion people will suffer from water
scarcity by the stated year. To help people find a way out of such challenges, the EU has
started working with different experts and environmentalists as well. There are different and
proper standards, rules and regulations set for consumers as well. Such standards are set to
make sure that water gets consumed in an efficient way. But before enforcing any kind of
legislation or implementing any clear laws, there are certain key parameters. These
parameters need to get addressed. These include regulations on the economic level, the
quality of the available drinking water and other economic regulations as well. These make
sure the effective use of water as a resource. This should ensure the demands of different
factors of production. Also, should be the case of other sectors as well. With all these
challenges combined, experts came up with a viable solution to the problem. They also
attempted to solve this problem by managing water usage by using different types of new
technologies. With rapid growth in population and increasing trend in urbanization, the
consumption of water remains constant on an increasing trend. Hence, making the most out
of the water resources and the efficient use of the most vital resource was necessary. In the
modern world, IoT or the Internet of Things is getting things done for people in the world.
Using services by different internet services like Mediacom Internet services there is a lot of
stuff getting done. These use different smart devices connected to each other via the Internet.
To help people get a better way to conserve water and related resources it is playing a very
cardinal role. IoT is helping people to control water resources in a very efficient way. It is
developing an efficient and optimized w way to keep a check on water.
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Not only this, it is providing smart ways to track water
consumption which is very crucial. It helps users to address
problems related to water. Once you have smart water
management and water monitoring systems in place, there
will be a better irrigation system. This will provide the best
facilities for urban areas and locals living in such areas.
Many of such systems are working in many places already.
It is a known fact that water leakage on a very vast scale is
happening in many places. There are reports that conclude
that around $3.0 billion gets spent almost every year. These
help in detecting and repair leakages. If companies start
implementing IoT and water management system to manage
water, more than $7.0 billion to $12 billion can become
your yearly. Let’s look at what is a Smart Water
Management looks like and what does a Smart Water
Management System looks like:
2. High level architecture for effective water management
Consumers in the water sector provide a weak critical mass
to influence in decisions resulting in appropriate changes.
The water sector operates in a complex interaction between
water resources and the socio-economic and environmental
systems. The range of stakeholders is huge, public and
private, from global to local companies, supported by
national, regional and again local authorities. This different
nature in stakeholders and also the various schemes for
water governance, which are continuously evolving in every
country, are the main reasons for current market
fragmentation in water management solutions. An excessive
market fragmentation is a severe barrier for innovation
under the desirable paradigm of an Integrated Water
Resources Management (IWRM), by slowing down the
adoption of open reference architectures and standards. This
approach could enable interoperability, making it easier for
developers to upgrade current solutions and integrate and
adopt innovative ones.
2.1 challenges for defining industrial standards for water
management
In order to define feasible and wider industrial standards for
water management processes, two main challenges must be
solved: 1) The lack of integration of current solutions and 2)
the unexisting common ICT reference model for water
management processes. There is a lack of integration of
current solutions. Although there are many global vendors
integrating water management solutions, local solutions can
be also developed and maintained. The small and local
nature of these companies make them anticipate to
unexpected changes and enables them to provide various
solutions for intra-regional issues. However, as consumers,
small businesses do not have the critical mass to influence
in decisions and to foster a reference system by themselves.
3. Smart water management
Smart Water management and monitoring systems are
capable of providing help as water solution providers. These
combine together using different devices and create a smart
water management solution. These are proficient in
monitoring leakage detection in real-time. Also, these help
in increasing the quality of water, managing water usage by
using sensors and other devices and more. These systems
help users by providing input to know the critical factors.
These factors include real-time water pressure, water levels,
water temperature, the flow of water and many other critical
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factors that fall in the domain. With this information on
hand, there is a darker end of the story as well. Not every
company has come up with some advanced, real-time
feature to help or determine the predictive analysis and real-
time changes related to water resources.
4. Integrating Iot in water management
Contributing to solutions that integrate the Internet of
Things paradigm into water management processes can be
beneficial to address expected solutions. The rest of this
Section describes the main benefits of adopting IoT and the
IoT characteristics that are considered in the proposed
MEGA model, considering new advances on ICT
technologies for creating feasible and commercial systems.
Mark Weiser defined a ”Smart Environment” as - the
physical world that is richly and invisibly interwoven with
sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements,
embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives,
and connected through a continuous network. There are
many research works that contributes to solve various issues
in Smart Environments, such as seamless access to
resources and devices, distributed service executions, social
choice techniques, etc. Other works explains how IoT is
based on three paradigms - internet-oriented (Middleware),
things oriented (Sensors) and knowledge-oriented
(Semantics). Although this type of delineation is required
due to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, the
usefulness of IoT can be unleashed only in an application
domain where the three paradigms intersect.
4.1 Iot for water management
The provision of Internet of Things capabilities in water
management scenarios can be achieved if we consider some
considerations from the business, social and technical point
of view. Here we list the main benefits of providing IoT in
water management scenarios: Efficiency increase: water
management companies and associations can use real-time
operational control to make smarter business decisions and
reduce operating costs. They can easily locate assets and run
preventive maintenance on critical pieces of infrastructure
and machinery. Productivity increase: Productivity is a
critical parameter that affects the profitability of any
organization subsystems.
4.2 Water management model
The water management model includes the physical model
and the process model. The Process Cell and Unit represent
entities in which processes are executed. Examples of
process cells and units are an Irrigation Sector and a Pump
Management Station (PMS) respectively. Finally, the
Equipment Module and Control Module are elements
belonging to the subsystem and cannot be directly accessed
by the Coordination layer. Due to the current advance in the
state of the art in IoT these elements will become Smart
Elements in a future and they will be directly identified and
accessed. Hydrants, filtering stations and pumping lines are
examples of equipment modules. Valves engines and meters
are examples of control modules. The process model
organizes the execution of particular processes in water
management subsystems, following a predefined strategy.
5. Benefits to users
5.1 More efficient handling of operations
By providing some real-time operations, organizations can
make use of real-time data and make smarter decisions. The
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real-time data obtained will help authorities and concerned
individuals make smart and concrete decisions. Also, these
real-time data obtained from sensors and less human
intervention help smart systems to improve your water
management practices.
5.2 More concrete efficiency and productivity
IoT helps users determine the real-time data and provides
information to make smarter and more intelligent decisions
for your home and business. Also, these predictive
maintenance features help to provide predictions about
failures that might occur in the future. You can further use
these patterns to fix risks in an instant. Finally, the output is
more productivity and more efficiency of the system.
5.3 Higher revenue generation
The Real-time monitoring feature of all devices that help
you in reducing the entire management costs. These devices
reduce maintenance costs to a greater extent. Also, it helps
save energy costs, improves operations and processes,
lowers infrastructure cost and requires less or no human
intervention. Apart from that, one of the major costs that get
consumed in the mobility of water that involves moving
water from one place to the other. Using IoT, the mobility
cost and the usage of water gets reduced. Hence,
organizations earn more and high-end revenues.
5.4 Less maintenance costs
According to a study carried out throughout the industry in
different states, more than 25 percent of preventive
maintenance activities get carried out within a short period
of time. Another study suggests that more than 40 percent of
such efforts do not result in no concrete outcomes at all.
Thus it results in the failure of assets or a certain asset.
Smart Water Monitoring Systems use data obtained from
such sensors. It removes any kind of a breakdown by half of
it. Also, it reduces by less than 15 percent.
5.5 More improvised and transparent use of assets
IoT sensors also provide data that helps in the real-time
tracking of all the assets performing their tasks of tracking
assets. They provide more visibility into the processes using
different mechanisms. This includes monitoring of drinking
water, the pressure of the water, pH temperature and many
other things related to water and water resources. Not only
this, the real-time data tells you a lot more. For instance,
theft and other related activities that occur in the end-to-end
processes. Analytics about the Internet of Things helps you
to manage different irregularities as well. Also, it provides
users with a real picture so that you can make more
intelligent decisions for your business.
Internet of Things and related systems bring about different
advantages to the elements present in the industry. In short,
it provides a new way that can help in collecting data, keep
a check and problem-solving. It is one of the most exciting
time for Internet of Things to get into action. It has created
new ways for other elements to stay active in different
industries.
6. Conclusions and future work
Water management impacts on several key matters of
human lives and several scenarios, such as cities, natural
areas, agriculture, etc. Some works focus in the lack of ICT
services and tools for water management, which would
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enable information reuse (Goal of the PSI Directive), easier
fulfilment of policy regulations and resource monitoring. In
this paper we presented the MEGA initiative for defining a
reference architecture for water management based on
integrating IoT capabilities to achieve a scalable and
feasible industrial system. We define the management
exploitation layer, coordination layer, subsystems layer and
administration layer and the interfaces that enable layer
interaction. We also consider the physical model, which
defines the physical elements executing water management
processes in a hierarchical way, and also, the process model,
which organizes the execution of particular processes in
water management subsystems. Processes are defined based
on automation principles and using the widely used standard
OPC UA. We illustrate how such architecture can be used
for controlling real water management systems, but still we
need to clearly define operation procedures for dealing with
many real problems such as physical network definition or
identifiers mapping. Finally, we describe the deployment
scenario we have defined for validation the MEGA model,
developed in Aula Dei, an experimental station on
Zaragoza, enumerating the list of functions that we are
going to test in this station. We can conclude that the
adoption of IoT and OPC UA facilitates water management
companies the access to a wider global market and
incorporates new benefits to decisions support systems,
monitoring, water governance and also water-energy nexus.
Future work will describe the performed test and will focus
on the contribution to solve coordination problems when
executing multiple recipes over the same physical resources,
considering priority and conditional executions and also
process optimization.
7. References
1. United Nations. Global Sustainable Development
Report - Executive Summary: Building the Common
Future We Want. New York: United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division
for Sustainable Development, 2013.
http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/globalsdreport/,
last viewed November, 2014.
2. Robles T, Alcarria R, Mart´ın D, Morales A. An
Internet of Things-based model for smart water
management, in Proc. of the 8th International
Conference on Advanced Information Networking and
Applications Workshops (WAINA’14), Victoria,
Canada. IEEE, 2014, pp.821-826.
3. Holland Trade, homepage:
http://www.hollandtrade.com/, last viewed November,
2014.
4. Association of Water Technologies, homepage:
http://www.awt.org/, last viewed November, 2014.
5. EU Water Framework Directive (Directive
2000/60/EC), 2000.