30 years from now, according to predictions based on current data, water will become such an expensive resource that bathing in the bathtub will be a luxury reserved for the richest. The drinking water crisis has already begun, and automated and intelligent tools for managing water resources and monitoring the environment have a vital role to play in saving urban water reserves in the world's major cities.
The key, as in all other areas, is digitalization.
The European research project NAIADES aims to minimize costs for water utilities by developing, implementing and integrating several innovative tools into the water ecosystem. Specifically, NAIADES introduces artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into the water ecosystem, leaving the management of this precious resource to robots. This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under funding agreement no. 820985.
The piloting has already started in three points in Europe: Alicante (Spain), Brăila (Romania) and Carouge (Switzerland).
The Dunărea Brăila Public Utilities Company (CUP Dunărea Brăila) works in partnership with the software company SIMAVI to digitize the drinking water distribution network in the Radu Negru neighborhood.
SIMAVI offers this pilot hardware and software support for:
- Collecting all the measurements from the water distribution network (pressure sensors, noise sensors, flow sensors)
- Modeling them and sending them to the cloud to AI services, in order to generate highly accurate predictions. Thus, the specialists from CUP Dunărea Brăila can collect and analyze, in a unitary way and on a in a single platform, all the data collected from the sensor system in the water network, historical information, real-time measurements, as well as statistics and predictions based on historical measurements.
- Reducing water leakage in the network, providing support for the integration of hydraulic models in combination with in situ and AI measurements.
At the same time, SIMAVI provides weather data for the city of Brăila, to help calculate water consumption in certain sectors.
SIMAVI contributes to the integration of NAIADES microservices, thus allowing the other pilots involved in the project (Carouge and Alicante) to view historical data, current data, statistics, predictions and, most importantly, generate alerts if certain measured values exceed minimum or maximum imposed thresholds. Both the specialists from CUP Brăila and the partners from Alicante say that the results of the water consumption prediction are promising.
What will happen when the pilot projects end and the software applications are completed? In the NAIADES Marketplace module, external users can view the services that the project provides. They can integrate other external applications with NAIADES services, when the prediction and statistical capabilities already developed within the NAIADES project are required.
SIMAVI has extensive experience in projects developed for European Union organizations, the European Commission and the Council of Europe, its team of specialists being involved in European projects for more than ten years.
For more information, please check: https://naiades-project.eu/
