Smart Analytics for Improving Efficiency of Water Distribution Networks

Host Organisation:	Phoebe Research and Innovation Ltd
Partner Organisation(s):	PA 1: University of Cyprus
Project Budget:	238.200,00 €
IDEK Funding:	195.540,00 €

An estimated 10-40% of Europe’s available water is wasted because of leakages in the supply system. In developing countries the situation is much worse, where water losses (mainly due to leakages) can reach 40-50% of the water supply. In Europe, this corresponds to more than 10 billion tons of water lost each year, or, in financial terms, more than €10 billion of lost revenues per year for all the EU water utilities. Besides financial losses, leakages can escalate to pipe breaks causing disruption of operation, water quality problems which could affect the well-being of the society, as well as increasing energy usage and increased greenhouse gas emissions which affect climate-change. In 2015, cities and communities in Cyprus lost more than 20-30% of their water due to leakages, corresponding to more than €10 million losses. Reducing this number by 5-10% would have a significant and direct financial impact on these organizations, in the order of €0.5-1.0 million per year. Today, most of the water utilities rely a) on consumers to report leakages, and b) on expert operators to monitor SCADA sensors for detecting events. However, a large volume of lost water is caused by leakages which are never detected. Academic research has advanced significantly in the past years with intelligent ICT solutions which can enhance the utilities efficiency and leakage detection capabilities. The WaterAnalytics project aims to bridge the industry with state-of-the-art research outputs. The general objective of the proposed innovation project is to conduct industrial research to develop and evaluate a novel product, WaterAnalytics, which integrates state-of-the-art intelligent monitoring methods, and big-data analytics to help water distribution system operators to improve system efficiency by 5-10%.