AquaNet Project

Project Goals and Objectives

This project spearheads the design and development of a smart, autonomous, self-powered and low-cost,pilot wireless sensor network (WSN) for drinking water management, appropriate for city-wide scale.Existing approaches for city-wide drinking water management are primarily based on remote monitoring of a limited number of remote storage tanks, usually at high altitude, as well as a few smaller distribution tanks inside the city and in proximity to the final consumers. Typical management is manual and heuristic and aims to keep the distribution tanks as empty as possible, given that water inside the distribution tanks is usually consumed quickly and cannot be re-distributed to other parts of the network (e.g. storage tanks). Additionally, the lack of a decentralized measuring system that could continuously monitor water flow results in slow detection of leakages (e.g. due to broken valves or pipes) or water thefts (e.g. due to illegal irrigation), which are left unnoticed for extended periods of time. Finally, the lack of an intelligent sensing network prohibits optimized operation of the water management company. For example, during summer the company aims to maximize reliability (and reduce shortages), while during the winter, the company aims to maximize revenues (and thus, the watering network should operate at higher water pressure, leading to increased consumption). The project aims to develop a low-cost and large-scale pilot WSN for water management that will be able to augment the existing monitoring and management functionality of the Municipal Enterprise of Water and Sewage of Chania (DEYAX).  DEYAX will offer the fertile experimentation ground, since a subset of their watering system, including storage/distribution tanks and  pipes will be networked with the proposed system. Concrete quantification of the benefits will be performed in conjunction with other WSN-free parts of the watering infrastructure. It is remarked that DEYAX and members of the AquaNet consortium have already  successfully collaborated in other applications