“ By 2045, an estimated six billion people will be living in cities. That means an enormous number of showers flowing, toilets flushing, and sinks being filled.”
per day by 2020( enough water to supply the city of Liverpool for 24 hours) or even 414 million litres per day by 2040( enough for Newcastle, Sheffield, and Liverpool together), if the trend for increased demand continues.
As a result, they have embarked on a smart metering installation programme that will see 414 000 smart water meters installed in London by 2020. By 2025, they will be dealing with 35 billion hourly meter reads every year.
Extracting useful information on water consumption from such vast amounts of data is not easy. One system, iWIDGET, aims to analyse usage patterns of individual households. It then presents results, comparisons, and feedback, providing households with information about their water consumption. It offers highly customised suggestions on how to reduce use and get better value for money.
Sewer flooding warnings
Nobody likes to be caught in a flood— especially not a flood from a sewer. Reliable information about the likelihood, the extent, and the location of such flooding in a city is very valuable, but current detection methods can be slow and expensive. Our research demonstrated the use of an alternative approach, RAPIDS( Radar Pluvial flooding Identification for Drainage System), which instead of detecting, actually predicts flooding in sewer systems. It uses computer models to assess very large networks in real time, and raise alarm of sewer flooding. Results of that work, which was applied to three areas of the UK, shows much higher accuracy in predicting flooding.
A wet future
Smart sensors, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and cloud computing are finally becoming involved in managing water systems in cities. This is partly due to the emergence of new water industry leaders trained in hydroinformatics— mixing big data with smart technologies to deliver more sustainable water solutions. A new discipline, one of its goals is to empower citizens to engage with water service provision on an individual level.
But to keep the taps running, the hydroinformaticians will need help. A new breed of specialist engineers and scientists is required to work across traditionally separate disciplines and manage the world’ s water supply. By 2045, an estimated six billion people will be living in cities. That means an enormous number of showers flowing, toilets flushing, and sinks being filled. So, in the meantime, we, and water systems, need to get even smarter. u
Dragan Savic
Dragan Savic, Professor of Hydroinformatics at the University of Exeter.
About the author
Professor Savic( FREng, FICE, FCIWEM, FIWA, MASCE, CEng) is the UK’ s first Professor of Hydroinformatics, having held this post at the University of Exeter since 2001. His research interests cover the interdisciplinary field of hydroinformatics, with applications generally in the environmental engineering / science areas, including water resources management( both quality and quantity), flood management, water and wastewater systems, and environmental protection and management.
30 Water Sewage & Effluent July / August 2017