AN ONTOLOGY FRAMEWORK FOR DECENTRALISED WATER MANAGEMENT AND ANALYTICS USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

摘要

Decentralized Water Management (DWM) technologies such as grey water recycling, rainwater harvesting, sustainable urban drainage systems, and their combined application, offer feasible ways of rationalizing existing regimes of water usage (tap water, grey water, rain water) through the use of appropriate technologies, which scale down and localize the management of water. However, the implementation of DWM systems as a mainstream practice is impeded by the knowledge gaps on their actual performance in a range of development types and settings. As the widespread uptake of these approaches in modern cities is relatively new compared to centralised approaches, there is limited information available on their planning, design, implementation, reliability and robustness.Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) provide a capable platform for low cost, high performance and real-time monitoring. By bringing together the strengths of WSN technology and distributed, reactive, knowledge management and representation, implemented as a dual-layer ontology framework, this work provides a holistic approach to the management of DWM systems. Realtime data on water consumption, water quality, soil quality, unusual events or infrastructure outages is exploited in order to: control the grey water reuse process, detect and react to any failures and unusual events (e.g., floods, bursts, pump failures), analyze and improve the efficiency of water reuse, and predict the optimal time for maintenance thus improving system availability.