A FIWARE-based IoT Framework for Smart Water Distribution Management

A key axis of design and implementation of sustainable water management solutions is based on the application of IoT, which enable the deployment of monitoring systems across the water distribution network, facilitate data acquisition in an automated manner and provide a rich set of data. Distributed software architectures are acknowledged as vital to realize smart water management systems, especially in large-scale and complex deployments with heterogeneous interacting entities. Current smart water systems mainly use commercial IoT platforms with only a few researches rooting for open source software solutions. However, both approaches have limitations as the closed APIs of commercial IoT platforms have been accused of hindering open market evolution, while open source solutions lack interoperability and data integration/sharing mechanisms. This paper presents an IoT framework based on FIWARE that aims to realize a highly flexible standards-based open source software solution for the development of smart water systems. We designed an architecture consisting of various FIWARE software components and two dashboard applications. We have also constructed a digital model of a part of a water distribution network and used a simulation dataset to showcase the framework’s functionality and data visualization aspects.