PILOT 6

Smart water tools and risk management

LOCATION:
Finland

BACKGROUND

KeyAqua is a network information system (NIS) for water utilities. Water utilities use the tool to manage data flows from IoT sensors, automation systems and meters to analyze water balance and condition indexes to find leaks, prioritize renovations and manage risks in the network. Also, visualizations of analyses in the NIS map give utilities great help in decision-making and reporting.

KEY FACTS

Historically water sector GIS and NIS solutions were based on proprietary underlying technologies, making integration and customer adoption very challenging. Today NIS systems are compatible with various 3rd parties and open-source technologies.
Data formats between systems vary, data is scattered, and integration needs adapters, separate projects and a lot of manual work in each use case. In many cases, data is not available at all, or it is available partially in non-appropriate formats.
The Water Utility sector is challenging due to a wide number of different stakeholders included in sharing data, for example, IoT and software solutions.
Improving support for open-source technologies and data-sharing approaches will allow the integration different systems and utilizing data to its full potential in utilities’ everyday processes and in decision-making.

EXPECTED IMPACTS

WATERVERSE objectives are:

More standardized data transfer – cost effectiveness and time-saving through integrations – savings for water utilities;
Enhance integration technologies – reliability of analysis interpretations;
Adapt open source technologies, opening NIS tool to new use cases.;
Data sharing approach and support for open-source technologies and integration interfaces
Better data availability to boost the development of more advanced analyses, with promising resource and cost savings.

With these steps WATERVERSE expected high impact will be:

Turn the management of the water networks more efficient, thus bringing monetary savings for the utility and benefits for the environment;
Reduce the new data-intensive projects’ time;
Boostst the development of more advanced Smart water solutions with promising savings;
Have a high positive social and environmental impact through optimal management of the network, reducing water leaks, saving water, prioprioritisingovations and better risk management and ensured water quality, reduction of energy consumption.