Smart Data Models for an efficient and safe Fresh Water Distribution

Water is one of our most precious natural resources. It is at the very heart of our daily activities and a key element for global well-being and sustainable economic growth. The growing scarcity of freshwater along with rising demands due to factors such as drought, overuse, leaking pipes, and climate change have become major risks for global sustainable development. The efficient and sustainable management of water distribution systems is not an easy task if we want to ensure safe and reliable freshwater supply to consumers while maintaining efficiency at a low cost, something which is fundamental in almost all industries, from farming to robotics.

Nowadays, a wide range of advanced tools and strategies are used to address pressing challenges in the water sector: from water quality simulations to modeling of water distributions systems, the water domain has not yet reached a satisfying level of maturity when tackling digitalization challenges such as fragmentation, lack of a holistic vision, or integration and standardization of the technology.

FIWARE4Water is contributing to the digitization of the water sector by providing an open standards-based architecture powered by FIWARE in which Data Models play a crucial role. This is because they define the harmonized representation formats and semantics that will be used by applications both to consume and publish data using the FIWARE NGSI API (NGSIv2 and soon NGSI-LD). Interoperability through data sharing will be demonstrated in four complementary demo cases that will use existing data (including cross-domain data), sensors, models, and simulators, improving long-standing tools (e.g. EPANET) and will introduce new (smart) ones while meeting end-users requirements. The final objective is to build a community of adopters around standard APIs and water-specific and data models that will help to develop innovative smart solutions in the water sector.

A standard API like FIWARE NGSI is basic for enabling data exchange between smart solutions. However, the availability of widely adopted (de-facto standard) information models is essential for creating a global digital single market of interoperable and replicable smart solutions in multiple sectors. These standards stimulate cost reduction and increase efficiency in water management. Information models provide an essential element when it comes to the common technical ground needed for open innovation and effective procurement. If we really want to foster economic development for all and work on creating the foundation of a new economy of data that facilitates industry growth, we need to promote new partnerships and create value-sharing business models so that actors in this new economy can move and work sustainably. 

FIWARE Foundation is currently working towards a unified approach to smart data along with contributions from GSMA and TM Forum data models: the Smart Data Models, an open initiative for agile data model standardization.

The Smart Data Models have been harmonized in such a way that they enable data portability for different applications in multiple domains: Smart Cities, Smart Agrifood, Smart Environment, Smart Sensoring, Smart Energy, and Smart Water, among others. They can be used for numerous purposes but certainly together with FIWARE NGSI-V2 and NGSI-LD, they fully support interoperability and portability of applications. In addition, they are free to use and open-licensed, and can, therefore, evolve to meet wider user needs. Smart Data Models are useful for those working in innovative projects that want to keep their data models and get support to maintain them. In that sense, these models should be compatible with those from other initiatives. 

The Smart Data Models initiative offers a community site with detailed data models available for open use in multiple sectors. The community consists of relevant organizations that collaborate to provide coherence and consistency between data models and domains, creating a method for agile standardization of the data models and their curation over time. The models are tested in real-life scenarios before being included. This provides extensive benefits to FIWARE platform users; in terms of more interoperability, reduced time dedicated to data model coding, and accumulated experience tested in real case scenarios.

The Smart Data Models initiative is based on widely adopted basic standards (including ontologies and international schemas), uses open licensing to allow extended use and adoption, and is based on git platform and GitHub as a development frontend. The initiative has a distributed approach allowing participation of different agents. The initiative provides some guidelines and management for ensuring consistency between the different data models. At the same time, its decentralized organization allows an agile community interacting successfully towards the evolution of future data models. 

These data models are created with the support of the projects in the European ICT cluster for water in cooperation with 4 further projects: aqua3S, Naiades, ScoreWater and DWC. 

The Water Network Management Harmonized Data Models describe entities useful for dealing with Water Network Management data. These entities allow the interchange of data with  EPANET solutions.

The main entities identified are:

• Curve: Defines data curves and their X, Y points.
• Junction: Represents junction nodes contained in the network.
• Pattern: Represents time patterns.
• Pipe: Represents all pipe links contained in the network.
• Pump: Represents all pump links contained in the network.
• Reservoir: Represents all reservoir nodes contained in the network.
• Tank: Represents all tank nodes contained in the network.
• Valve: Represents all control valve links contained in the network.

These data models, together with an open source solution for interconnection create the possibility to gather data from the water network sensoring facilities and later export them to be ingested into EPANET software in order to address the challenges in water networks. 

Other water-related areas in which these ideas are starting to show meaningful successes are water quality and safety, water distribution and water consumption. 

Author: FIWARE Foundation