Drought and massive water leaks in the subsoil of large cities, such as those recently reported in the Barcelona metropolitan area, make it more necessary than ever to improve the management of water resources in urban environments. The implementation of smart, connected systems for water supply and purification infrastructures has clear benefits and will come with time. However, as the sector is currently wanting in digitalization, this transition must be agile and carefully monitored.
Drought and massive water leaks in the subsoil of large cities, such as those recently reported in the Barcelona metropolitan area, make it more necessary than ever to improve the management of water resources in urban environments. The implementation of smart, connected systems for water supply and purification infrastructures has clear benefits and will come with time. However, as the sector is currently wanting in digitalization, this transition must be agile and carefully monitored.
A new study has laid the foundations for how this process should be carried out. The brain behind it is Cristina Villar, a graduate of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and an employee at one of Spain’s top tech companies, where she designs digitalization and security solutions for multiple types of infrastructure.
Carried out as a final project for the University Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering, the study examines what needs to happen for this renewal to take place and describes the network architecture and specific type of hardware required to secure the water supply chain, which is key considering that climate change and population growth are making this resource increasingly scarcer.
Villar, who is listed as the study’s first author, said, « In water treatment and management, there is a considerable lack of development and standardization of digital protocols. Instead of creating a unique or inflexible design, we wanted to lay the foundations of operation to adapt this environment to the needs of Industry 4.0 and Spanish legislation. »
Her master’s degree final project is published open access in the journal Smart Cities and was supervised by Victor Monzon Baeza, currently a researcher at the University of Luxembourg. Having achieved excellent results, the study was later published in MDPI Smart Cities as a research paper co-authored by Raúl Parada, researcher at the Telecommunications Technology Centre of Catalonia, and Carles Monzo, member of the UOC Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications.
