An IoT-based framework for smartwater supply systems management

Abstract

Theworld's population growth and climate changes increase the demand for high-qualitywater. This fact forces humankind to create new water management strategies. Smart cities have successfully applied the Internet of Things (IoT) technology inmany sectors. Moreover, Complex Event Processing (CEP) can analyze and process large data sets produced by IoT sensors in real-time. Traditional business processes are too rigid in expressing the dynamic behavior of water supply systems. Every execution pathmust be explicitly specified. On the other hand, declarative business processes allow execution paths that are not prohibited by the rules, providing more flexibility for water supply managers. This paper joins together IoT, CEP, and declarative processes to create a powerful, efficient, and flexible architecture (REFlexWater) to manage water supply systems. To the knowledge of the authors, REFlexWater is the first solution to combine these technologies in the context of water supply systems. The paper describes the REFlexWater architecture and demonstrates its application to a real water system from a Brazilian municipality. Results are promising, and the managers from the Brazilian water company are expanding the use of REFlexWater to other sectors of their water supply system.