An innovate testbed for smart water infrastructure: the smart water campus

Up to now, information and communication technology is mainly utilised at main points of urban drainage and water distribution network, while the actual system behaviour in the majority of the networks remains unknown. In this regard, the Internet of Things concept can increase the data availability significantly, as the combination of low-cost sensors and innovative wireless data communication technologies enables large-scale installations of measurement equipment even in underground and remote locations. Following, new approaches in management of urban water infrastructure (UWI) are emerging including decentralised and smart approaches (e.g., smart rainwater harvesting). However, these approaches are relatively new and unknown, therefore it is difficult for decision-makers to justify investments.

In this work, the smart water campus of the university of Innsbruck is presented as an innovate testbed for smart and data-driven applications. The campus  is equipped with a large number of measurement devices and parameters are measured in high resolution (1 to 15 min) using different communication technologies for data transmission. Thereby, the quality of service strongly depends on the used communication technology and the installation places. Additionally, low power wide area networks like LoRaWAN operate in the public frequency ranges and data gaps have to be expected. The measured data (all except data from the water distribution network) are freely available under https://umwelttechnik-swc.uibk.ac.at.

The high-resolution data allows for evaluation of system conditions in real- time, enabling new possibilities in operations (e.g., smart rainwater harvesting for cross-system improvements) and fault detection (e.g., leakage and stagnation). Additionally, a special focus of the smart water campus project is on informing the population about the elements of the UWI (e.g., information panel, scavenger hunts to particularly address children) to make the hidden UWI more visible.

As experiences show, smart applications can improve the system performance, but also increase the requirements on the project team for a successful implementation: (1) detailed knowledge about communication technologies (and their limitations), (2) sufficient IT-knowledge for the implementation of the data flow and management, and (3) social sciences for the integration of different participants. Additionally, it requires effective measures to achieve economic (due to investment costs) and ecological (due to battery powered devices) sustainability.

The smart campus shows that it requires a coordination of appropriate communication technologies for each specific application but that smart applications can improve the performance of the integrated urban water infrastructure.

Oberascher, M., Kinzel, C., Kastlunger, U., Schöpf, M., Grimm, K., Plaiasu, D., Rauch, W., Sitzenfrei, R., 2022. Smart water campus – a testbed for smart water applications. Water Sci Technol. 86(11), 2834-2847. https://doi.org/10.2166/wst.2022.369.