Peter Meissen [email protected]
Camiel Eldering [email protected]
Serge van Schie [email protected]
Mijn gegevens zijn: Nan Zevenhek [email protected]
Serious maker
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Challenge of the SMART WATER CITY version 20151006 11 uur
Description
Describe the new solution based on your idea or concept. What it is, how it works and its
relationship with existing solutions
Our main goal in this project is to increase the awareness of citizens about their influence in
the water cycle with the focus on their role in reducing the effect of large rainfalls. Most
people assume that only local government and the conservancy (waterschap/heemraadschap)
are responsible for solving water issues, but according to the law households should process
rain falling on their ground as much locally as possible. However, little attention is paid to
this. Since most of the sewer system lies underground the only time you can tell it did not
function as planned is when flooding or damage occurs. To get people in action triggers are
needed, one of the most trivial of all is financial. The general idea is to grant reductions in
taxes when a reduction of water emitted to the sewer system is demonstrated. Because of the
fact that the individual water output per household is not measured there is no objective
financial compensations for actions taken by citizens or neighborhoods to provide local
storing or infiltration of water.
Our proposed solution is a sensor placed in local domestic sewer connections to collect data
about the ‘thickness’ and amount of the waste water. The thickness measured during rainfall
gives an indication about the rate in which connected households have disconnected rainwater
from the sewer.
Using this data, combined with open data about rainfall, models can indicate how much
storing capacity of the local sewer system is in use or will be used downstream.
Software applications can be used to analyze the combined collection of open data together
with other open data of the smart city like groundwater levels, attitude etc.
Benefits for Center Parcs/Municipality of Amsterdam
Describe which business issue is resolved/addressed and the added value/expected results the
customer/organisation will gain from this new solution
In Amsterdam it is very important that the wooden foundation of the houses are kept wet. In
areas where the groundwater level is too low it will be a good thing to give people insight in
the effect of their effort for extracting the rain water from the sewage system.
Also, the quality of the surface water will increase if the use of sewer system overflow is
reduced.
Center Parcs are located in beautiful nature or even in national parcs. Water shortage due to
lower groundwater levels has a negative effect on the diversity of plants and animals. It is
interesting for both children and adults to recognize in practice the effect of different
measurements in coping with large rainfalls. Especially in rainy periods this can be very
attractive to both children and adults if educational aspects are combined with water pleasure
aspects. It will show that the Center Parcs organization feels responsible for a good
environment for the next generation.
Market
Indicate to which other smart city issues this new solution can be applied, the competitive
situation; are you first in the market or are there competitors who have a similar solution?
What makes your solution superior to others?
The sensor might collect data per household (not open data due to privacy requirements),
which can be used as base for a new tax system of the conservancy or local government. It is
cheaper to clean ‘thick water’ then large amounts of water diluted with rain water. On a
longer time scale an adjusted behavior of citizen with maximum of extracted rain water,
might reduce investments in new sewage treatment plants, expansion of the sewage network
and may also reduce the high water risks downstream.
Other advantages are that, due to more infiltration of high quality water, the groundwater
system will be more robust. Nature, farmers and industry will be able to use it more often in
the also expected longer dry periods.
At this moment there is no cheap, robust inline solution for measuring the thickness of waste
water of households or the amount of waste/rainwater in the separate parts of the sewage
system. So this sensor needs to be developed. The current systems are big, energy consuming
and costly. They are used in sewer plants and individual research spot’s.
In a practical sense every city with a sewer system could be interested in sensorising in this
way. The sales potential is worldwide.
In a Center Parcs environment this might be an opportunity for a special attraction or games.
By assuming that data about the thickness are available, developers of applications can be
invited at e.g. Hackathon Eindhoven day to combine these ‘open data’ with other open data
for creative applications.
Hardware/Software
Offer a short description of the technology you need to prototype your idea (hardware,
software, connectivity)
An indication of the thickness of water can e.g. be measured by electrical conductance. Added
parameters as temperature gradients, sound or vibration measurement and others need to be
considered in order to get the figures right. Analyses of collected data combined with rainfall
data and known reference situations where rain water is extracted from or added to the sewer
system can indicate the amount of water in the sewage system. Sensor development is to be
arranged in conjunction with professional partners. Several parties are interested in the
concept and willing to co invest in sensor research. The sensor’s itself need to be robust and
energy efficient due to placement in the sewer system. Possibly the temperature difference
between the waste water and the surroundings can provide enough energy for the sensors and
data transmission. Sensor testing can be performed in sewer systems and using the dedicated
sewer system measuring plant in Breda.
Because all the sensors need to be connected a large scale, low bandwidth, low cost data
communication solution is essential. For KPN it is an interesting pilot to show the advantages
of their new network LoRa (low range, low energy) as the sensor will have only small
amounts of energy available for sending their data to the network.
Data collection, verification and n-dimensional modelling will be executed by ireckon!, this
company uses the Microsoft Azure platform to develop and deploy smart city sensoring
projects. For this project specific data handling, modelling and output needs to be developed.
One of the biggest advantages of using this platform is it’s scalability, every city big or small
could be connected, while a startup demo with a single sensor is relatively cheap to connect
and handle.
Security and Business continuity
List known potential risks in security and business continuity and indicate briefly if an how
they could be tackled.
In order to meet the current privacy regulations it is important that no personal information is
gathered, therefore the sensoring must be regulated in such a way that only general
information is collected.
Application software will be running in the Microsoft Cloud, which covers all known security
and availability issues.
Sensoring and communication will be realized in a simple and robust way, furthermore only
general data is collected, so little risk is involved by failure of a single measurement point.
Today no sensors for measuring thickness of waste water are in use in the city and there are
rough models and long term data analyses to predict capacity issues of the sewage system.
Ground water models also show long term effects of e.g. urbanization.
Without using the efforts of a large number of citizens to reduce the effect of the increasing
number of large showers, the solution will be to accept more local damage or temporary
overflow or to increase the capacity of the sewage system. Which is very expensive. But that
is the backup system if it is not possible to persuade citizens to adjust their behavior related to
water tasks.