2023-05-09 12:45:27
Drought and massive underground water leaks in large cities, such as those recently reported in the Barcelona metropolitan area, make it more necessary than ever to improve the management of water resources in urban environments. The adoption of connected and intelligent systems for water supply and purification infrastructures has clear advantages and will come with time. But currently the sector has a low level of digitization, so this transition must be done quickly, but also controlled.
An investigation by Cristina Villar, a student at the Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC) who works in one of the main technology companies in the country designing digitization and security solutions for multiple infrastructures, has established the bases on how it should be done. This process. His work, within the framework of the university master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering, analyzes the necessary requirements for this renewal and also proposes the network architecture and the type of specific hardware to ensure the water supply chain, a resource that climate change and the increase in population make it more and more precious.
“In the treatment and management of water, there is still a lot of development and standardization of digital protocols and, instead of creating a unique and inflexible design, we wanted to lay the operating foundations to adapt this environment to the needs of industry 4.0 and legislation Spanish”, points out Cristina Villar, co-author of the research. Her final master’s thesis, published open-ended, was directed by Victor Monzon Baeza, currently a researcher at the University of Luxembourg. Following the excellent results, the work has been published by the academic journal Smart Cities, with the collaboration of Raúl Parada, a researcher at the Telecommunications Technology Center of Catalonia, and Carles Monzo, professor of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications Studies .
In his opinion, the renewal of critical infrastructure related to the water supply chain should be configured with an architecture that includes an action and measurement group (the extensive device of sensors on the ground) and an interference-free network to cover and send the data generated to the central computing group, the main axis of the solution. This part of the system would be in charge of collecting all the data from the sensors and executing commands that it would send to the actuators. These commands could be manually configured by those responsible for maintaining the system or could be automated to improve the agility of action of the water control system. All data would be stored in NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, ideally deployed on highly available servers located in private Data Centers (DPCs). These servers would have a backup system and would be duplicated so that, in the event of contingencies, the system would continue to be active and not suffer outages.
Said information may be extracted and studied through data analysis processors and may be uploaded to the cloud for further computing and application of artificial intelligence. The authors propose the adoption of the NB-IoT protocol for the devices in the field, since it uses all the necessary communication security protocols, as well as the 4G mobile network coverage for connectivity, since its level of coverage deployment is high.
All of this should meet a series of requirements to adapt to current regulatory criteria and achieve optimum performance. These include factors such as the high availability of the systems used, that they can be updated without affecting the continuity of the service, that they allow a maintenance plan with constant remote supervision (24 hours a day, seven days a week) and that the data they generate can be homogenized for processing.
Water supply is a very important service, the value of which we often do not take into account. (Image: Amanda Mills/CDC)
In order to maintain the security of the system, it is also interesting to have different and segmented infrastructures, whether physical or virtual, and “a high availability infrastructure with several firewalls in cluster mode to ensure the redundancy of the systems that support the solution”, they detail. the authors of the study.
“Cybersecurity plays a vital role in these critical infrastructures and therefore it is crucial to consider recommended guidelines, such as the distribution of firewalls and servers in geographically independent zones, to ensure high availability, in such a way that a drop in one of these zones does not affect the rest, ensuring the use of two data processing centers. Nobody wants a hacker to be able to enter the system and leave a town without water,” explains Villar.
With this digitization process, many operations could be automated and improvements of various kinds could be achieved, such as controlling that the water purification is high enough so as not to alter the ecological environment, measuring the amount of energy consumed by the system, detecting and acting quickly in the event of leaks in the supply chain, monitor the level of water purification treatment or find out the average annual hours of interruption of the water supply service.
Among the advantages that would be obtained with the proposed infrastructure are the low economic cost and low consumption of the NB-IoT sensors, the wide range of sensors available with the LPWAN solution, which allows long ranges of communication through the cellular network, and the low investment cost, since the infrastructure of existing 4G radio stations for telephone operators is used. Also, using an open source management platform improves compatibility with other application code that might integrate with the platform.
Looking further afield, the authors of the study also bet on the use of hyperautomation and artificial intelligence systems as another implementation that must be taken into account in the future to reinforce the preventive maintenance of network components and thus avoid incidents due to wear of the pieces. These robotic processes would also avoid, to a large extent, possible human errors, although it would always be necessary to have technical operators for possible unforeseen cases.
“In Spain, water control systems are still very green in terms of digitization. They are very traditional and difficult to connect to the Internet, but it is the ideal time to make a big bang and be able to implement real-time control with in order to avoid wasting an asset as precious to humanity as water”, concludes the UOC-trained engineer.
The study, published in the academic journal Smart Cities, is titled “Guidelines for Renewal and Securitization of a Critical Infrastructure Based on IoT Networks.” (Source: UOC)
#Future #water #management #smart #cities