Water scarcity is an increasingly frequent and widespread phenomenon in the European Union and affects at least 10% of the European population. Around 10-40% of Europe’s available water is being wasted because of leakages in the supply system or lack of water-saving technologies. In Cyprus, 20-30% of water is lost due to leakages, which corresponds to more than €10 million losses.
What’s more, small-medium size utilities do not typically have the human and financial capacity to apply technologies for minimizing leakages, and often they end up with higher percentage of water losses. Most water utilities are currently relying on consumers to report leakages and on their operators to monitor sensor measurements for detecting events.
The WaterAnalytics project aims at making smart water technologies accessible to all water operators, by offering them an innovative low-cost intelligent software/ hardware solution designed to reduce the water system’s operational expenses, leakages, and energy usage. The solution is based on state-of-the-art research-based data-analytics, crowd-sourcing, and machine learning, to improve the ability to detect and isolate events within a water distribution network.
The main outputs of the project will be a Platform, an Apps repository and a hardware IoT-enabling device. The platform will consist of a back-end server with distributed databases, big-data analytics infrastructure, Geographical Information System server for processing, a task scheduler for handling the orchestration of the different services and a web server. The Apps repository is populated with software modules that the WaterAnalytics Platform can use to expand its capabilities and the IoT-enabling device interfaces with generic sensors/actuators to provide connectivity to the WaterAnalytics Platform.
The project’s results will have a benefit towards the quality of life, through reducing water losses and operational expenses, reduction of energy usage, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and much more.
This project’s partnership consists of the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus and PHOEBE Research and Innovation Ltd which deals with the design, development and realization of cloud-based solutions to help system operators and consumers to enhance efficiency, security and quality of their services.
Project website: https://www.wateranalytics.eu/
The WaterAnalytics project receives funding from the Research and Innovation Foundation/ Programme RESTART 2016 – 2020 / I. SMART GROWTH / RESEARCH IN ENTERPRISES / ENTERPRISES/0916/0023.
