FIWARE Announces the Kick-off of the 5th Mission Support Committee During the FIWARE Smart Fest

The Smart Water Session at the FIWARE Smart Fest was held on June 8, 2021- 16:30- 18:00 (CEST) and featured many speakers who are experts within the water sector, including among others:

• Dr. Panagiotis Balabanis, Unit B1 “Circular Economy & Biobased Systems” at  DG R&I
• Dr. Nicolás Caradot, Project Coordinator, Kompetenzzentrum Wasser Berlin 
• Dr. Christos Makropoulos, Professor at the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens
• Dr. Chris Sweetapple - Research Fellow at University of Exeter

During the session, the experts discussed the opportunities at EU level in the water sector, collaborative initiatives between EU projects like the DW2020 Synergy Group, FIWARE vision and value proposition for Smart Water, as well as use cases and expert sessions about the connection between EPANET simulation tools and the FIWARE technology and integration of Smart Modflow into FIWARE for watershed monitoring.

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threads were identified during the session. 

The EC is putting a lot of effort into the development of a strategy for the digitalization of the water sector with initiatives like the European Partnership Water4All “Water Security for the Planet” and the European Green Deal initiatives together with the research and innovation ecosystem already created around Digital Water like ICT4Water and DW2020. This strategy clearly reflects the EC strong commitment toward promoting the creation of a smart water value chain.

Nevertheless the landscape is fragmented, complex and yet not as digital as it can be,  not to mention that it  lacks  standards at EU level. This can be considered as an opportunity for FIWARE  to promote the use of open source technologies, the definition and use of smart data models that improve  the interoperability between solutions and data, and the promotion of different standards on water management like ETSI NGSI LD and other standard initiatives in Europe. 

A new horizon is in front of us to guarantee that water resources are managed and used in a sustainable way. The goal is, hereby, increasing  the digitalisation of WASH services, keeping investment and financial support for water development at regional and national levels, and managing water across competing developmental sectors to meet multiple challenges.

Main needs identified on the digital water front so far are:

  - Developing intelligent management of water flow using bi-directional communication.

  - Deploying real-time smart monitoring and decision making.

  - Boosting digitization of the rural water sector.

  - Fostering advances in autonomous and intelligent sensor capabilities.

  - Deploying flexible and scalable data management and data analysis services (Data Spaces).

  - Nurturing advances in research for low cost and reliable sensors/transducers (physical, chemical, biological). 

  - Creating digital usable representations of water systems (Digital Twins)

FIWARE supports these needs in many ways:

 - Advances in data sharing and Interoperability through Smart Data Models (1) initiative and ETSI CIM NGSI-LD (2)

  - Modelling Digital Twin Water Data and Architecture using FIWARE Enabling Technology

  - Enabling the free flow of non-personal data

  - Developing common information exchange standards following a cross-domain approach

  - Integration of Standards Water Management Systems

  - Easy integration with Water Simulation tools (EPANET, MODFLOW, SWAT)

  - Fostering a Community of adopters

Smart Water – FIWARE Mission Support Committee

During the event, FIWARE Foundation announced its  5th FIWARE Mission Support Committee (MSC) devoted to bringing FIWARE technology to the Water Sector with the following objectives.

 - Define, maintain, communicate and demonstrate the unique FIWARE  selling points in Smart Water.

  - Drive key standards for Smart Water.

  - Advance the FIWARE SW-MSC Reference Architecture and align with other initiatives.Explore the knowledge inference based on Big and Small Data.

  - Unleash the potential of right-time open data.

  - Digital Twin representation of water systems.

  - Develop Water Data Space including enhancing the data economy and ensure data sovereignty.

  - Support the exchange of information, coordination and influencing of Smart Water related activities.

Interested in joining the FIWARE Foundation Smart Water Mission Support Committee? Please send your requests to press.office (at) fiware.org