Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Intelligent Urban Water Supply Testbed
water quality monitoring as well.
of these configurations may not be optimal,
e.g. because of the incorrect initial
assumption of the usage patterns, and
consequently energy efficiency is not
optimal. When many pumps are connected,
energy usage profiles can be established in
the context of the actual water usage
patterns. The outliers can be identified much
more effectively and can then be addressed.
The purpose of the Intelligent Urban Water
Supply Testbed is to determine the best
ways to connect to the equipment and at the
same time build a cloud-based service to
collect and analyze large amounts of data
from a great number of equipment.
The first technical objective is to provide
visibility remotely into the operation of the
equipment and simultaneously enable a
faster response to detected problems.
The third objective relates to water quality.
In order to ensure water quality, the first
step is to enable visibility. Visibility is
achieved by deploying water quality
measurement instruments, across the water
pipeline network. Yet, these instruments are
too expensive to install in large numbers to
monitor the whole network's water quality.
On the other hand, if small numbers of
instruments are installed in strategic
locations, data collected from these
instruments can be analyzed to infer water
quality across the pipeline network based on
its topology.
Secondly, by applying data analytics,
equipment anomalies can be detected and
failures diagnosed automatically. Thus, the
reliance on human operators for these tasks
will be reduced. When the number of
equipment increases to tens of thousands, it
is difficult or practical to employ enough
staff to manually monitor the operation of
the equipment.
Traditional Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA) systems usually rely
heavily on manual work in operations. It is
expected that more and more advanced
analytics can be applied to perform these
types of tasks and gradually reduce the
reliance on humans. From the technical
perspective, the fir