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" SMART WATER IN SMART CITY " : A CASE

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Conference Paper · June 2016

DOI: 10.5593/sgem2016B31

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 Section 12: Hydrology and Water Resources

„SMART WATER IN SMART CITY”: A CASE STUDY

Janusz Karwot, Ph.D.

Prof. Jan Kaźmierczak, D.Sc.
Ryszard Wyczółkowski, D.Sc.
Waldemar Paszkowski, Ph.D.
Piotr Przystałka, Ph.D.
1
Water and Sewage Company, Rybnik, Poland
2,3,4,5
Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland

ABSTRACT
The paper reports in the first part a current state of investigation as well as
implementations in practice of some results of research projects, which have been
focused on water use in urban area and carried on in the City of Rybnik, Upper Silesia
Region, Poland, since 2004. The problem of water distribution and use as well as
problems of managing technical infrastructure of water management is described in the
paper from the point of view both of scientists and practitioners involved in the projects.
Basing on their current experience and state of knowledge, the authors present in the
second part of the paper some new ideas and concepts associated with the use of
modern tools supporting water management and the creation of the end-user
participation in improving the water distribution system. Finally, some practical
proposals concerning interactive cooperation between the water supplier and water final
users are briefly described.
Keywords: Water Supply, Smart City

INTRODUCTION
Water is one of the basic resources needed to man. The ever-increasing demand for
water resulting from economic development and population of the world requires
constant pursuit of activities related to water management, ensuring the rational
development and utilization of water resources, but also the development of devices and
networks necessary to raise water supply in sufficient quantity and quality. As a very
important element for the efficient execution of tasks concerning water and wastewater,
the operation of water and sewage companies has to be considered. The functioning of it
is determined by many factors, including:
• pressure from external stakeholders on cost optimization of processes of water supply
for the population and receiving, municipal sewage treatment,
• shrinking resources of drinking water and the need to diversify sources of supply, or
the search for methods of rational management of current resources in situations of
shortages,
• the extent of distribution of water supply systems especially in urban areas with
diverse specifics of field, building, social aspects etc.
16th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2016

The purpose of this article is to discuss the idea of a management-aiding system for
water supply network in a holistic manner, i.e. covering both aspects of operating,
monitoring and diagnostics and control. The idea is based on works carried out by the
research team combined of researchers from the Silesian University of Technology at
Gliwice, and the Water and Sewage Company at Rybnik, that have taken place in the
framework of two research projects accomplished in 2004-2014. After conducting
relevant literature research and presenting current achievements in the construction of
complex, characterized by synergy, system of water supply residents of the city of
Rybnik, Upper Silesia Region, Poland, the authors present their thoughts on the future
direction of the management of water distribution. Based on these considerations, in the
final part of the paper the idea of "Smart Water in Smart City" is presented, whose
implementation is currently being pre-operational.

RESULTS OF LITERATURE RESEARCH

Recent challenges for water and sewage companies cause that advanced systems are
being more often involved in their activities. It is worth noting that three major
directions of the development of such systems are as follows:
 development of decision support systems for control, monitoring and fault
diagnosis of water distribution networks,
 development of management support systems for maintenance and reliability of
components of such networks,
 development of information systems for demand side management.
Taking into account the current state of the art in the context of the first direction one
can observe certain distinctive features of the offered solutions. In many researches and
innovation projects the special attention is paid to the application of GIS-based systems
in creating useful tools. As a result, these tools can be easily employed by technical and
administrative staff e.g. for presentation of the analysis outcomes, for optimal selection
of water routes, for analysis and optimization of operations of actuators (pumps, valves,
etc.) and other devices (i.e. measurement units) [9] as well as for leakage detection,
localization and identification [2]. It should by also noted that numerical-hydraulic
models of the network play the important role in management of water supply systems
and they have become even more important and valuable assets for such systems.
Hydraulic models can be applied for solving different tasks such as the planning of
short, medium and long-term investments, the analysis and optimization of the
performance of the sections of water mains, and the prediction of maintenance
operations and repairs that require temporal changes of the water flowpath [14, 15].
Hydraulic simulation models of the network are increasingly used in practical
applications, and therefore they are one of the fundamental components of complex
systems to support management of urban water supply and sewage networks. In the last
few years, new ideas have been introduced in this area, concerning model-based leakage
detection and location [11, 15]. To this end, the methodology of KDD (Knowledge
Discovery in Databases) is extensively used [10; 13]. Focusing on the second direction,
it may be stated that management support systems for the mentioned purposes are still
rare or less noticeable. In this area, the main objective is to have the possibility of
planning and evaluating the maintenance police taking into account different
 Section 12: Hydrology and Water Resources

quantitative criteria. In accordance with the good practices of water and sewage
companies the most common approach consists of [1, 7]:
 information acquisition (data corresponding to service and repair works), that is
needed to collect relevant data into databases of computerized maintenance
management systems or enterprise resource planning software,
 maintenance model creation based on the set of reliability parameters which are
estimated using the data stored in databases of such systems,
 the visualization and interpretation of the modeling outcomes taking into
account the limited set of reliability parameters.
It should be also stressed, that methods and tools widely indicated in the literature do
not allow to utilize complete information on objects, events and maintenance processes
for decision making purposes. Moreover, the analysis of management solutions for
coordination of the technical staff in this kind of problems [8] leads us to state that there
is the need to improve methodologies and systems for short, medium as well as long-
term prediction and planning of activities in the context of maintenance and reliability
of components of such networks. Bearing in mind the current state of the art dealing
with information systems for demand side management in the case of water networks, it
should be noted that the applications of such systems are extremely rare. In contrast,
smart energy networks are firmly supported by means of advanced information
technologies. Unfortunately, urban water supply and sewage networks do not have
comparable tools as well as legal regulations. However, the issue of consumer research
related to water distribution systems is still present in the academic society. The newest
methods are focused on the sociology of water efficiency and it confirms the need for
performance optimization of water supply networks taking into account a social factor
[3].

BRIEF REPORT ON RECENT RESULTS AND IMPLEMENTATIONS

There were three different IT tools supporting operations management of water supply
systems. Basing on the analysis of operational tasks performed by a maintenance staff in
water supply companies, the needs and opportunities for IT supporting within the area
of maintenance have been identified. They can be divided into three main groups:
 tools for registration components of the networks and technical facilities (materials,
tools) used for maintenance and repair works (i.e. ERP systems),
 tools for monitoring the condition of water supply system (i.e. SCADA systems),
 tools for identification and spatial location of the water supply components (i.e. GIS
systems).
It should be noted, that methods and tools used in this area do not allow for full
utilization of collected information about the exploited objects, exploitation events and
exploitation processes, for the needs of exploitation decision-making process. In
particular, there is a clear need to supplement the information path of the exploitation
processes for:
 tools of both pre-detection and location of failures, that would be easy for
automation to promptly detect and locate individual events, and, thereby, reduce the
time required for the reaction and removing the of failures
16th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2016

 typical analytic and decision-making tools allowing efficient enrichment of existing

management solutions,

Fig. 1.a. Sample screens of the Integrated System of Control and Management of the
Exploitation of Water Supply System: sample ISOZE screen

Fig. 1.b. Sample screens of the Integrated System of Control and Management of the
Exploitation of Water Supply System: sample SysDetLoc internal blackboard.

The concept of the support system, outlined by the conclusions from the analysis carried
out in the studied company, relied on adding supplement organizational and technical
solutions that operating in the company with tools to support the detection and location
of a network failure, as well as a comprehensive assessment of the operational activities.
In this way, it was developed the Integrated System of Control and Management of
Exploitation of the Water Supply System, which includes two subsystems:
1. Intelligent System of Failure Detection and Localization - SysDetLok, which allows
for detection, localization and signaling of network failure. This system is a result of
works conducted by a research team from the Institute of Fundamentals of Machine
Design at Silesian University of Technology and domain experts from the Water and
Sewage Company PWiK Rybnik. The methodology of developing such scalable
 Section 12: Hydrology and Water Resources

systems is presented in [11], and details of this works can be found e.g. in [15].
Fault detection, signalized by this system, is the starting point for the initialization
procedure to generate a set of operating events.
2. Intelligent System for Supporting Operational Events - ISSOE, which is based on
the collection and processing of information resulting from the realization of
maintenance works. Then, it is carried out the evaluation and visualization of the so
called exploitation activity of separate sections of the water supply network on the
basis of grades and ranks [5].
The sample screens of the system developed are shown in Fig. 1.a and 1.b.
According to the authors, implementation of the system in the industrial environment is
not the final step in the development of prepared methods and tools. At the current stage
industrial research is being conducted. They depend on improving the method of
leakage detection and localization, verifying the correctness and effectiveness of the
rank method based on data from the real working environment - the activities of
maintenance department. Some research connected with qualitative assessment of the
impact of technical objects on the environment was taken, too.

INTELIGENT WATER DISTRIBUTION IN URBAN AREAS

Analyzing results of their recent research, focused on creating and developing a system
of supporting management processes of water distribution in urban areas (as briefly
introduced in the previous part of this paper) the members of the research team have
identified some possibilities of extending the proposed design solution to some new
aspects of the management of the water supply network for a widely seen decision
support in the area of water distribution in urban areas. In particular, the following
important aspects of task management support are assumed to be taken into
consideration:
1) broad monitoring, network control and diagnostics,
2) network maintenance and operation,
3) issues related to the interaction of media supplier with end-users.
Therefore, an initial view of the research project was proposed which is based on the
idea of the Intelligent Building combined with the model of Smart City with a special
attention paid for the problem of various networks (water and sewage, gas, electricity,
heat), which are the infrastructural backbone of the urban space. On the other hand, the
collection of problems, not only technical in nature, concerned with the third of above
mentioned aspects need to give special attention. It is assumed to apply in this area the
participatory approach. Authors of this paper have had some practical experience in
using this approach for the needs of management in urban areas. Additionally, the
possibilities offered by the Technology Assessment (TA) [4] approach and the practical
aspects of diagnostic knowledge acquisition [10; 12, 13] are intended to be explored.
When one tries to make some extension of the three above mentioned aspects, it can be
stated that:
Ad 1) At present, there are all sorts of partial support of original methodologies being
developed to solve selected problems (control, monitoring, optimization
selected) using different ideas and different methods. The authors of methods
and related tools are teams derived from research centers, and verification of the
results takes place rather in a laboratory scale or by computer experiment than
by implementing on real objects. In addition, these methods vary in scale and
16th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2016

used measurement system – from the method covering the entire subnet, which
is based on several points of flow to the measurement methods, covering only a
few quarters of urban network that uses several pressure measurements. The
challenge is to develop a coherent methodology for building systems supporting
management of water supply network in a comprehensive way - covering all
relevant to water company problems. Initiators did not meet with such a solution
as proposed in these assumptions, and thus the methods that may realize the full
potential of such a system. The natural consequence is also a need to develop
methods that have been designed to suit presented demands (complexity of
meeting the needs and exploiting new opportunities measuring systems) or in
their absence, developing new ones. Initiators plan in a first step to recognize the
range of needs common to the total number of such enterprises. Then the plan is
to divide the task into partial steps and structuring them by model problem: e.g.
routing, optimization and forecasting. So divided tasks can be successfully
solved with the use of artificial intelligence methods, with the verification of
effectiveness of various methods for different network chips. At the end, based
on the analyzes and results of the verification, consistent methodology for
building support systems will be constructed, understood as a way of planned
implementation of selected partial methods. It should be emphasized that such
an approach proved successful during the implementation of previous works.
Ad 2) The challenge is to develop operations support systems based on knowledge. So
far, the typical systems (e.g. ERP) are mainly dedicated to collecting and
processing data – e.g. setting common indicators of process operation. There is
no solution of an advisory system nature - interpreting designated indicators
values. This is particularly visible at the strategic level, where indicators do not
give the answer to the question, what will be the long-term effects of operational
policy including strategies of water distribution companies. The proposed way to
meet this challenge is a variant development of operating procedures and their
evaluation, taking into account the dynamics of the changing of proximal and
distal environment of the enterprise. It is proposed to:
 use previously developed and implemented models of operating indicators
for the construction of a quantitative model for assessing the operational policy,
 build a set of scenarios describing possible development (course) of operational
processes and the intended effects of decisions and operations at certain points
in the future [6],
 develop a method of multifaceted interpretation of operational indicators in the
light generated automatically sets future variants (scenarios). Such a system,
based on the resources of data and knowledge collected and properly ordered in
prepared repositories, will solve operational decision problems of supply system
stakeholder groups, short term - intervention, medium term - during a single
cycle of service-repair, long-term - over a number of service and recovery cycle.
Ad 3) The challenge is to create the so called demand side management mechanisms.
The problem to solve here is not the same structure interaction platform allowing
them to exchange information between supplier-user, but such its design
and implementation, that the platform is "adopted" among the customers and is
widely used by them. At present, an additional problem is that there is no lawful
possibility to use multiple tariffs taking into account the time of day and the
consumption amount or a direct financial incentive. The way to solve this
 Section 12: Hydrology and Water Resources

problem is to use methods and processes derived from social engineering and a
proper diagnosis of client’s needs, their attitude to this idea, expressed
expectations and concerns, and then to conduct a targeted, effective promotional
and awareness raising campaign.
The added value of the solution will be development of a coherent methodology for the
construction of an integrated support system, consisting of methods that meet the
growing needs and expectations, e.g. using capabilities of complex measurement
systems, offering expert support in the ongoing operation (especially in crisis situations)
and in medium- and long-term horizon, introducing (and leveraging) business
interactions with end users. The following measurable goals will be achieved:
• development of a comprehensive method of water distribution management,
• support of operational decisions using expert knowledge,
• utilization of an online platform to interact with various stakeholders.
The solution will be verified by cooperation and verification of its performance under
quasi-real conditions in selected subnetworks of Water and Sewage Company in Silesia
Region. Through the project, the initiators plan to achieve the following results:
1. development of the methodology of building support systems for managing a water
supply network (and methods necessary component of this methodology),
2. develop methods for operations support systems in water distribution systems
having the character of an expert systems, working in the context of different time
horizons tor solving operational problems,
3. develop a platform to interact with end users that provides individual customer
information (dynamic data exchange using the interaction: system-recipient. The
latter are supposed to be used for communication with an end user - firstly, for
exchanging significant information - e.g. quick diagnosing of uncharacteristic use
of water by the recipients, secondly - for building a positive relationship between
the supplier and the recipient as well as pro-environmental attitudes, seeing future
benefits of such cooperation in critical situations such as the need of water
rationing. At the same time the implementation is aimed at making savings on
water losses, costs of maintenance operations and more accurate planning of repairs
and investments.

CONLUSIONS
The authors of this paper, describing their recent research as well as some plans for the
future, intend – in addition to verifying their ideas and plans of research – to present in
this form an offer of cooperation both in the implementation of research and
implementation of the results of such research in practice. Even now, in addition to
stable group of Polish partners to cooperate seek potential partners from other countries.
A part of this work has been carried out within the framework of the Sectoral
Operational Program “Increase in the Competitiveness of Enterprise”, research project
WKP_1/1.4.1/1/2004/3/3/235/2005/U “The system of the monitoring and management
of operating the water supply and sewage systems of the city of Rybnik” and
Operational Program “Innovative Economy”, research projects POIG.01.04.00-24-
027/09-00, POIG.04.01.00-24-027/09-00 “The integrated intelligent system of the
monitoring and management of operating the water supply and sewage systems network
on the area of the activity of Water Supply and Sewage Systems Company in Rybnik.
 16th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2016

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