An IoT system for continuous monitoring and burst detection in intermittent water distribution networks

Water distribution networks suffer from huge amount of losses due to frequent burst and leak events. This problem is conspicuous in intermittent water networks due to their inherent limited supply and service irregularity characteristics. A continuous monitoring of the operating hydraulic parameters of the network combined with accurate critical event detection can vastly reduce the ramifications of the problem. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) and the trending Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can offer a smart, low-cost, and scalable mechanism to attain such objective. In this paper, we present the initial phase of building a smart wireless system optimized for continuous monitoring of intermittent water distribution network (IWDN). The system design properly exploit the intermittent nature of the water supply in order to optimize the performance of the proposed system and algorithms. We demonstrate the system node and server prototypes and the performance results of the proposed adaptive Kalman filtering burst and leakage detection algorithm using simulated events and real measurement data from a case study of a pilot intermittent supplied district meter area (DMA)in Hurghada, Egypt.