Feasibility of using smart meter water consumption data and in-sewer flow observations for sewer system analysis: a case study

Abstract

Globally, smart meters measuring the water consumption with a high temporal resolution at the consumers' households are deployed at an increasing rate. In addition to their use for billing or leak detection purposes, smart meters may provide a detailed knowledge of the wastewater inflow to the sewer systems in space and time and open up for new types of system analyses aimed at closing the urban water balance. In this study, we first validate the smart meter data against other, independent water distribution data. Subsequently, we use a detailed hydrodynamic sewer system model to link the smart meter data from almost 2,000 consumers with in-sewer flow observations in order to simulate the wastewater component of the dry weather flow (DWF) and to identify potential anomalies. Results show that it is feasible to use smart meter data as input to a distributed urban drainage model, as the temporal dynamics of the model results and in-sewer flow observations match well. Furthermore, the study suggests that in-sewer flow observations may be subject to unrecognised uncertainties, which make them unsuitable for advanced investigations of the DWF composition, and this underlines the necessity of collecting data from independent sources. The study also exemplifies that digital system integration in the water sector may be complicated. However, overcoming these obstacles may improve both offline and real-time urban drainage management.

The Bellinge data set: open data and models for community-wide urban drainage systems research

“…in different departmental systems) and by different external contractors, which makes integrated analysis tedious and resource demanding (e.g. Lund et al, 2021). We thus also encourage discussion on how the various information sources provided here may work together as required in future digital-twin environments (Pedersen et al, 2021b).…”

Towards the long term implementation of real time control of combined sewer systems: a review of performance and influencing factors

“…As the recovery of resources becomes a more important part of the WWTPs/WRRFs, this type of control is likely to become more prominently used in practice, providing the associated risks (see section 2.6) can be minimised. Using new data sources, like smart meters of water consumption, can generate more detailed picture of the DWF in a system (Lund et al 2021;Zhang et al 2021), opening new possibilities for DWF based RTC. Research in the potential of integrating this new data source has not been reported.…”

Smart management of combined sewer overflows: From an ancient technology to artificial intelligence

“…Within the concept of the nonstructural measures; MPC (Abou Rjeily et al, 2018; Zhao et al, 2019), RTC (Edmondson et al, 2018), and optimization techniques (Shishegar et al, 2018) have been widely used in combined sewer systems management. Smart storage tanks (Troutman et al, 2020), smart pipelines (Stoianov et al, 2007), wireless sensors (Montestruque, 2008), smart metering (Lund et al, 2021), smart sensors (Tatiparthi et al, 2021), cloud computing (Troutman et al, 2017), supervisory control, and data acquisition (SCADA; Larry, 2000) have also been used in data collection, control, and operation of sewer systems.…”