CREAF advises Aigües de Manresa to digitalize water management with international standards

Aigües Manresa and CREAF collaborate in the deployment of the sensorization of the project " Sustainability in the Water Cycle. A territorial digitalization project " with the aim of promoting more efficient, intelligent and sustainable management of the service.

The objective of this project is to monitor variables such as flow, pressure, tank levels and domestic consumption in real time. This will allow for the detection of leaks, the generation of alerts and the improvement of both preventive maintenance and the response to incidents.

The technology deployment is not only applied to the drinking water network, but also includes the sewage and sanitation system. With the same infrastructure and technology based on the SensorThings standard, it will be possible to manage data on both potable water and wastewater, allowing for an integrated view of the entire water cycle.

To control the network, Aigües Manresa usually uses several devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), such as sensors, flow meters or chlorine analyzers, which transmit data to a centralized computer system.

To ensure a solid database compatible with other computer systems, SensorThings was chosen, an international standard for managing sensor data, which also allows the incorporation of geographic information from QGIS , a free digital mapping software.

The joint work between Aigües Manresa and CREAF focuses on designing this data infrastructure following the international SensorThings API standard. This system allows the data generated daily on the network to be easily integrated and consulted, and has been designed to be compatible with different technologies.

This is where the collaboration of Joan Masó , a CREAF researcher and member of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) - an international organization that defines open standards for the management of spatial and environmental data - stands out. The OGC has prominent members such as NASA, Amazon, Google and the European Space Agency, and promotes solutions that favor the reuse of environmental data on a global scale.

Joan Masó, an expert in geographic information systems (GIS), advises Aigües Manresa to correctly apply the SensorThings standard and adapt the company's own data to it, guaranteeing that it complies with international quality and interoperability requirements.