Executive summary

Urban water systems are responsible for abstracting, treating and delivering clean water to consumers, and, subsequently, collecting, transporting, treating and releasing waste water safely back into the environment. These systems are among the most critical of a nation’s infrastructure and are often complex, interdependent, spead out physically over a wide geographical area, and subject to various constraints such as reliance on ageing assets. In many cases these systems are operating at capacity and frequently require expansion to respond to new developments and wider urban growth.

The adoption of new information communication technology (ICT) to enable the water network operators to intelligently monitor, analyse real-time information, and take appropriate actions, is seen as a key way of reducing the strain on urban water systems. This is achieved by increased efficiency instead of expansion. ICT acts as a key enabler to integrated water resources management – essentially the holistic management of water resources.

To this end, the water industry has begun a transformation through the use of smart systems. A big part of this is the increased adoption of sensors, analytics software, and decision support tools. However, current smart systems technologies are severely lacking in integration between their different elements. Furthermore, they lack the ability to contextualise the large amount of data collected from urban water systems in a way that promotes scalability, portability and future adaptability.

This publication focuses on how to rectify this problem by using an approach driven by semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning. In the context of smart technologies deployed in urban water systems, it means describing the physical, virtual, social, economic, and organisational elements and features within a smart water system, and the relationships between them, in a computer interpretable manner.

This publication proposes a viable solution to the problems of achieving efficient and scaleable use of large scale data in urban water systems, in the form of a reference architecture that uses a semantic description of the smart water domain. Exemplar use cases of the reference architecture are presented, along with a methodology of how a concrete implementation can be deployed on an urban water system.