Critical Infrastructure Management

Usage Scenario B – Critical Infrastructure Management

Overall Description

The Critical Water Infrastructure Monitoring and Control use case focuses on the management of the water urban cycle in metropolitan environment of Coruña. The base of this system will be made of a complex portfolio of probes, meters, sensors, devices and open-data sources deployed on the field, including: water, flow and pressure meters on the water mains; smart devices, which measure the main chemical-physical characteristics of water; pluviometers, which can monitor the level of rainwater in a specific zone, water circular pumps, which can be used to control the flow of liquids in heating systems. These devices will be geographically distributed, heterogeneous and will be provided by different owners: directly by the water utility, by end-users themselves or by third-party service providers, like, SMEs providing ancillary water services. For this reason, there will be many different data involved in these scenarios: meteorological open data, reservoir water level data, purification data, distribution data in the various subsystems, customer data in urban water supply processes, sewage collection and sewage treatment data in different subsystems. The collection of all these data will allow to provide value-added services, like showing to the client, commercial or not, the quality of the water provided to them or the possibility to react quickly to critical situation and to do predictive maintenance, through the ability to detect anomalous behaviours and to fix them, before they become an issue difficult to be fixed.

Challenges

  1. Integration in a unique solution for remote monitoring of all the data provided by the heterogeneous IoT platforms.
  2. Implementation of actuation features in all the platforms involved.
  3. Security issues, particularly for the privacy protection of shared data.

BRAIN-IoT Approach

The BRAIN-IOT solution will enable this scenario, allowing to collect data from all the different domains and to actuate the devices where needed. The WOT based approach used for the design of the platform, will be leveraged to collect the data, provided by different IoT platforms, using heterogeneous protocols and data formats. Specifically, the use case will involve SICA-EMALCSA platform, SOFIA2 platform, MACRAUT platform, AGATA platform and other private platforms. Furthermore, BRAIN-IOT will focus particularly to design and develop ways to control devices abstracted by these solutions. For example, the system needs to allow the managers to control the circulator pumps, regulating the fluid flow in heating system, to avoid problems or to react to some critical situation detected through the monitoring sensors.

The collection of the data about water consumption from different sources generates risks about privacy protection. Indeed, the data can be shared with public entities or third-party services providers for several purposes, like statistical measures. To do this, the data need to be associated with all the potentially interesting contextual information (i.e. Position of the data, timeslot when the data have been measured and so on), but removing the association with all the personal info of the entity, related with that data. Finally, security mechanisms will be used for the actuation of devices that is potentially a dangerous task, which must be executed only by expert personal that need to know well what they are doing and the context in which the device is operating. For this reason, mechanisms of accounting, authentication and authorization will be used to guarantee that only authorized expert users are able to do these tricky operations.