Smart Metering of Water System

Bearing in mind the need to adapt the water sector to new technologies, and within the framework of the Smart Cities concept, more and more Managing Entities (ME) are using smart metering systems to monitor water quality, combat water losses and combat to apparent losses. Smart metering emerges, in this sense, as the basis of all intelligent strategies for the management of water supply infrastructures in urban areas, with intelligent metering to combat apparent and real losses being the natural step to the improvement of the management efficiency of the managing entities.

Water Distribution System (WDS) have in their composition infrastructures capable of producing and distributing a good of strategic value for human beings, which is water. In each step of the WDS, the flows must be measured so that the exploration data are known, since the measurement is not only crucial for the equity of services and available uses, but also for the guarantee of the universality and justice of the same, in short and citing “You cannot manage what you cannot measure” (e.g., Koecha et al., 2018).

There are several methodological approaches for the control of water losses, always having as main premise the economic component of the problem. For the beginning of this type of approach, the ME must have implemented the modularization of its WDS, being the sectorization of the network, through the creation of District Metered Areas( DMA) a basic step for the implementation of active loss control, to in addition to the active and regular inspection of the network layout.

The project “District Metered Areas (DMA) of the Water Distribution System of the Municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz” emerged as part of a global project for the Active Control of Water Loss in the Municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz, and consisted of the creation of 17 DMA's. The Municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz (MRM) is the ME that manages the supply system, in downtown, of the municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz, which supplies 10828 inhabitants, has a network extension of 170.6 km, 6882 connection branches of which 6383 branches are active, imports 874,906 m3 of water annually and presents rates of Actual Water Losses and Unbilled Water of 14 l/( branch.day) and 21.6%, respectively, according to data from the Annual Report of Water and Waste Services in Portugal (RASARP 2021), for 2020 data. For definition of the DMAs of Reguengos de Monsaraz, a study was carried out with the creation of the hydraulic model of the supply network using the EPANET 2.0 software. Also the number of pressure reducing valves used in the city are in accordance with the needs that the model demonstrated. For urban agglomerations, villages with a network length of about 5 to 10 km, with a maximum number of 680 branches and only a single delivery point were automatically considered as natural DMAs. The communication system will be the LoRa system, in order to maximize the existing system in home telemetry under test, with data connection to the same protocol and software in the near future.