Real-time data on water usage benefits
providers and end users
Editor’s note: This article is by Bradley
Eck, IBM Research-Ireland’s Smarter Cities Technology Centre manager in
Dublin.
A faucet that drips just once per second
wastes 2,700 gallons
of water, annually. My Water and Environment team is developing tools and
methodologies, as part of an EU-funded project called iWIDGET, to manage urban water demand by reducing waste like leaky
taps.
iWIDGET links 9 expert partners together to look at
how analytics and smart meters can help cities and their citizens get real-time
data on their water and related energy usage – with the aim of improving the
management of urban water demand by reducing waste, and improving utilities’ understanding
of end-user demand, and ultimately reducing customer water and energy costs.
iWIDGET provides householders with easily accessible information
that will allow them to make decisions on how to reduce water usage, and thus,
their water bills. Plus, as utilities will have better visibility on their
customers’ usage, they will be able to more-accurately forecast demand – and
send their customers alerts if a leak is suspected.
Building iWidget
For our part, my team in Dublin focused on iWIDGET’s system
architecture to improve a utility’s planning, operation, and management of
real-time sensor data, and developed analytics around the high-resolution
consumption data. Not an easy task, as this involves
noisy raw data and dozens of third party systems and analytical tools. So,
we built an API for the entire system that connects and interfaces with each
partner’s components.
|
iWidget on the iPhone |
Some of the components can be accessed via mobile
applications. Meter Replacement, for example, looks at the history of readings
and meter type to determine the best time to replace their meters. Another app
focuses on pump scheduling, where real time data from smart meters feed in to a
pumping plan that helps reduce energy costs.
iWIDGET system trials have started in Portugal, Greece
and the UK,
and will conclude in 2015. The envisaged outcome of the iWIDGET project is
increased interoperability between water information systems at the European
Union and national levels, and overall improved efficiency of water resource
management.
Labels: ibm research - Ireland, iwidget, mobile application development, smarter water, utilities