Grounds and Facilities Maintenance

Water is crucial to survival: it is a necessity for everyday life in homes and also in agriculture and public services such fire brigades. This means municipalities must manage rainstorms and floods in real-time and have an effective system of distribution and management for a water utility. A system of distribution requires the optimal delivery of clean drinking water to the people while a management system involves managing surface water such as rainfalls, snowmelts, and floodwaters. Water management in a smart city can recognize anomalies in rainfalls, flood mappings, and water consumption patterns of the users, and implement best practices to eliminate cost delivery and water waste. Therefore, municipal authorities can plan to monitor events of rainstorms and floods to avert or mitigate its consequences on existing infrastructures through forecasting, monitoring, and implementing effective IoT strategies.

Problems, Applications, and Solutions: Rainstorm and Flood Monitoring

It is hard for the human ears or eyes to pick up wavelengths or detect sound waves while monitoring floods or rainstorms. Often, once floods become visible to the human eye, it is already too late to avoid damaging property. Technologies that monitor and report on rainfall, tides and water levels can help municipalities manage the risk of flood. Solutions can also be applied to reduce Non-Revenue Water (NRW) loss by finding leaks quickly, reduce treatment and pumping costs, and potentially transform wastewater treatment plants into resource recovery facilities that produce energy. These benefits can lead to improved bill accuracy for customers and help cities tackle water management without large-scale changes to physical infrastructure.

Technologies

Manual water measurement – The traditional method of water quality and environmental protection uses manual collection and analysis of water samples from different water sites in a testing laboratory. Water reading was also done manually by city workers going door-to-door.

Cameras – Smart IoT cameras can be used to monitor and provide regular, visual updates on the condition of bridges, culverts, and drains. These cameras can be powered by solar power, send emergency information broadcasts in real time, and send photographic updates to field technicians through an online portal.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) – This is a remote sensing radar that uses high-resolution imagery to calculate rain footprints and monitor floods. SAR systems emit a radar pulse and record the land surface return at the satellite.

Ultrasonic Sensor – This sensor is mounted over water and is be used to detect water levels during flooding and send the data detected through a wireless connection such as radiofrequency. The sensors transmit a sound pulse that reflects from the water surface and measures the time it takes for the echo to return.

Ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) spectroscopy – This technology tests water contamination based on the measurement of light absorption to quantify bacterial concentration levels in water samples. It can also be used to monitor chemicals used for disinfecting water sources such as chlorine and fluoride.

Smart irrigation – Smart irrigation uses IoT solutions to connect irrigation control points to a computing platform to calculate evaporation and transpiration value to determine the optimum time to irrigate. This technology calculates the loss of moisture in the soil, using wind, humidity, solar radiation and temperature as input data. This will determine the appropriate water required to sustain plants.

LoRa wireless metering devices – LoRa devices and wireless network combines precision ultrasonic sensors with long-range wireless modulation to monitor and detect flooding and overflows in the city. LoRa is useful where cellular and Wi-Fi based networks are ineffective and instead connects to a non-cellular network that uses lower power and bandwidth. The report from the sensors is sent in real-time and when there is possible flooding, the sensors send an alert in real-time to warn the municipality.

Smart meters – Smart water meters provide remote meter reading, data analysis, communicate details of water consumption and can also detect and report leaks. These meters can be installed or retrofitted into home, commercial or industrial settings to ensure bill accuracy and avoid unnecessary water costs. Data from smart meters can be used in mobile apps or web portals that allow customers to view their water usage, compare water consumption to neighbours, and forecast their next water bill.

Leakage detection and control – IoT sensors can monitor water pressure, flow volume and direction, and acoustic sensors. These sensors collect data which will be uploaded to a secure server where it will be analyzed and communicate notification alerts about leakages, all via wireless connectivity.

Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) – AR and VR technology can support technicians and city workers by providing holographic representation of pipes, cables, and other assets for scenario-based training for employees and real-world scenarios.

Autonomous robot and drones – Robots and drones can be used to collect videos to be used in defect detection and classification software, reducing the need to close roads and analyze video screens. Deep learning and AI software can tag defects quickly and send reports about areas in need of attention.

Sewage System Overflows – Location-based sensors using sonar and radar technology can be installed in manholes to measure water levels and detect early signs of sewer overflows. With the location, these sensors can trigger an immediate alarm when the water flow rises above a set value for water levels. When such happens, the municipality can release the overflow of untreated water into the appropriate place to store or dispose of storm water. The data from these sensors can also train artificial intelligence systems to predict sewage performance during storms, find optimal places to store or direct wastewater, and electronically inform pump stations of optimal conveyance and treatment of incoming water.

Water quality monitoring – IoT sensors can measure water quality by its conductivity, alkalinity, turbidity, temperature, and thermometry of the water. The sensors can operate in power saving mode to transmit regular data updates for analysis. Different qualities will be measured by individual sensors, some of which use spectroscopic techniques, and collect data that will be logged and transmitted in scheduled intervals to a data analytics or storage platform.

Precipitation and flood monitoring – Precipitation and flood monitoring system use weather observation systems through weather radar and modeling and can incorporate warning features based on real-time observations. These systems may use ultrasonic depth sensors to measure water levels, satellite-based forecasting equipment, radio wave measurements between radio towers, and wireless rain gauges. Monitoring solutions can also be integrated with smart city solutions such as traffic controls for safety purposes.

Smart wastewater networks – A centrally controlled network of integrated products and solutions including IoT sensors, automated pumps, conveyor belts and sorting machines to separate solids from other waste can be used to treat wastewater and release cleaned water back into rivers or other use. The networks also rely on analytic software that can translate data to actionable insights to support informed decisions about wastewater management.

Managing Liability Issues

Privacy
Issues.
⚠️ The above-mentioned water services technologies may give rise to privacy issues where personal information about an identifiable individual is involved. This could occur where smart meters identify and track the water consumption of a particular household or where camera monitoring water levels can capture the images of individuals. These liability issues include data concerns relating to data ownership and privacy concerns relating to consent and identification of individuals.
Managing Issues.
✅ Face blurring. Cameras can use machine learning to automatically identify people in images and videos and then blur out the faces or whole bodies of individuals. Since cameras will be used for the purpose of water and flood monitoring, there is no need to capture or store footage of identifiable people.
✅ Use larger usage maps, not individual households. If developing an app or web portal that allows citizens to view their water usage and see how their neighbourhood compares, the usage map should show a radius for the usage rather than any specific address.
✅ De-identify data of personal information: Most technologies such as cameras allow for the de-identification of persons captured and transferred during data collection.
✅ De-identify as soon as possible: Data collected should de-identify persons captured in the process during the collection of information. Face blurring software can be automatic using machine learning and AI.
✅ Restriction of data sharing: Most times, there can be no restriction on the data collected but there can be a restriction on how the data collected is shared from one network port to another to reduce the misuse of personal information collected in the process.
✅ Minimize data collection: This is the minimization of data collection to what is needed or required.
✅ Follow good privacy practices.

Security Issues
Issues.
⚠️ There are security concerns from the use of these technologies such as poor encryption measures, weak firewalls, ransomware, manipulation of the sensor data to create a panic, and system hijack.
Managing Issues.
✅ Many of the same solutions to privacy issues will address security issues: e.g., de-identify at source if possible, or as soon as possible if otherwise. Where personal information is collected, it should be held in a secure location.
✅ Encryption. Encryption protects personal information by a process of scrambling data so that it can only be accessed with a unique decryption key which will translate the data back into its original readable form. There are several types of encryption algorithms to protect the actual personal information data as well as the channels of communication in which the data travels.
✅ Authentication. This prevents unauthorized access to the network control of these technologies using processes that verify their clearance to access the data. The level of authentication should commensurate with the risks. Two-factor authentication offers an extra layer of security by requiring two pieces of information, making it more difficult for someone to gain unauthorized access.
✅ Limit access to data. Physical, organization and technological measures to limit access to data should be in place to only allow access to those who need to handle the information.
✅ Regular audits and security patches. Where city data is stored on cloud-based servers, the cloud platform should be subject to consistent audits and security patches, with a data recovery strategy in place.
✅ Regular software updates. Most technologies have routine software updates to prevent hackers and eavesdroppers from loading malicious software that disrupts network data. Security assessments for software should look for risks and vulnerabilities to ensure security approaches are up-to-date, appropriate, and effective.
✅ Maintenance of Hardware. This prevents a breach of the security parameters on hardware by hackers or thieves. Hardware devices that are identified to be compromised can be isolated until maintenance is performed.
✅ Security platform. Establishing a security platform that analyzes data, searches for potential indicators of compromise with the capability of implementing security measures such as isolating affected devices.
✅ Ensure that partners have adequate safeguards. All partners or contractors should have adequate safeguards depending on the sensitivity of the information in their control.
✅ Follow good security practices.

Procurement
Issues.
⚠️ Most water monitoring solutions will involve the purchase of products or services from third parties, which will raise procurement issues about vendor lock-in, long-term costs of the technology, and choosing between high-tech and low-tech solutions.
Managing Issues.
✅ Procurement issues should be dealt with by following sound procurement practices .
✅ Intellectual property issues will arise over ownership and confidentiality of data. Access and other data entitlements should be addressed at the outset, as part of the conditions of procurement. Carefully review intellectual property issues.
✅ Deciding between high-tech and low-tech solutions will depend on several factors: (a) What is the use case? Emergency responses to flood and water management will likely rely on the speed, accuracy, and scalability that “smarter” technologies offer. On the other hand, long-term planning may not necessarily require those features. (b) Costs – low-tech solutions tend to be cheaper to acquire and maintain. (c) Use of existing infrastructure – solutions that can make use of existing infrastructure will have lower costs than brand new construction projects. (d) Scalability – the scalability and large-scale deployment should be considered for long-term costs and vendor lock-in. Assess bid submissions on the risks of scalability and flexibility to deal with structured and unstructured data, as well as the capacity to connect with other IoT devices.
✅ Follow sound procurement practices.