Monitoring and forecasting water consumption and detecting leakage using an IoT system

Abstract

Water is an important resource for life and its existence and, unfortunately, large quantities of water are being wasted on a daily basis. Monitoring the consumption of water can control water usage, and smart technologies can play a useful role. In this paper, a smart system based on Internet of Things (IoT) has been proposed to monitor the water consumption in an urban housing complex. An ultrasonic sensor, together with Arduino, continuously monitors the water level of water tanks on rooftops and sends these data to a server through a Wi-Fi module. Using the data collected from the IoT system, the daily and weekly average water requirement of households can be calculated. Support vector machines (SVM) are used to forecast water consumption. The observed readings are divided into training and testing datasets. Water consumption is predicted for each day for a user. Error is recorded as the difference between the actual consumption and the predicted value, and it decreases as the number of days increase. An algorithm to monitor leakage of water in the tanks has also been proposed. A web interface allows the user to visualize the water usage, monitor their consumption, and detect any leakage and leakage rate in the system.