Smart Water Management: a Self-Sufficient IoT-Based Application for Pressure and Flow Monitoring in Water Distribution Systems

Water distribution in municipalities involves various challenges, such as maintenance of pipelines, pressure and flow control, water quality monitoring, among others. In this sense, measuring the flow and pressure of a system is a key issue for optimizing water distribution in cities. Therefore, this information is important to ensure that water is delivered with quality and in adequate quantity to consumers. With the advent of technology, some advanced solutions have been proposed in the literature to address these challenges, such as hydraulic modeling software, intelligent sensors, and automated control systems. Among these, one of the most commonly used techniques to increase system efficiency is wireless sensor networks. However, monitoring in a wide coverage area, such as metropolises, becomes difficult to implement, involving high costs and infeasibility of large-scale sensor installation. Therefore, applications involving IoT (Internet of Things) have been proposed as a low-cost and low energy consumption alternative. Thus, this article describes the steps, challenges, and solutions necessary for the development of a self-sufficient IoT application aimed at monitoring pressure and flow in a water supply network.