A Holistic ICT Solution to Improve Matching between Supply and Demand over the Water Supply Distribution Chain

While many water management tools exist, these systems are not usually interconnected and therefore cannot communicate between one another, preventing Integrated Water Resources Management to be fully achieved. This paper presents the solution proposed by WatERP project* where a novel solution enables better matching between water supply and demand from holistic perspective. Subsystems that control the production, management and consumption of water will be interconnected through both information architecture and intelligent infrastructure. The main outcome will consist of, a web-based Open Management Platform integrating near real-time knowledge on water supplies and demand, from sources to users, across geographic and organizational scales and supported by a knowledge base where information will be structured in water management ontology to ensure interoperability and maximize usability. WatERP will thus provide a major contribution to: 1) Improve coordination among actors, 2) Foster behavioural change, 3) Reduce water and energy consumption, 4) Optimize water accountability

Simulación electromagnética FD-TD : una ayuda al diseño en compatibilidad electromagnética

Peer Reviewe

AI for Improving the Overall Equipment Efficiency in Manufacturing Industry

Industry 4.0 has emerged as the perfect scenario for boosting the application of novel artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions to industrial process monitoring and optimization. One of the key elements on this new industrial revolution is the hatching of massive process monitoring data, enabled by the cyber-physical systems (CPS) distributed along the manufacturing processes, the proliferation of hybrid Internet of Things (IoT) architectures supported by polyglot data repositories, and big (small) data analytics capabilities. Industry 4.0 paradigm is data-driven, where the smart exploitation of data is providing a large set of competitive advantages impacting productivity, quality, and efficiency key performance indicators (KPIs). Overall equipment efficiency (OEE) has emerged as the target KPI for most manufacturing industries due to the fact that considers three key indicators: availability, quality, and performance. This chapter describes how different AI and ML solutions can enable a big step forward in industrial process control, focusing on OEE impact illustrated by means of real use cases and research project results

Integration Of Water Supply Distribution Systems By Using Interoperable Standards To Make Effective Decisions

This paper aims at presenting current standards used and their implementation to integrate different decision making tools spread throughout the Water Supply Distribution Chain. Nowadays in Europe the water supply distribution managers use many tools to perform their decisional processes and multiple data sources to aid in decision making which are totally unconnected and use different communication languages. The data and protocols heterogeneity provides a lack of fluidity in communications between the tools, and in many cases non-existent. An architectural proposal, which uses hydrologic standards, with the aim to offer a common way to interconnect existing tools and data to provide an easy way to take better and effective decisions, is proposed in this paper. To achieve the goal, tasks such as the identification and analysis of the different standards and protocols that are currently present in the water world have been reviewed focusing in the OGC standards as main target. Moreover, the current tools used for decision making in the water supply distribution approaches have been identified and analysed to detect the key issues for their integration through these standards. Furthermore, a background of water supply distribution chain systems, interoperability and standards in hydrological systems are also summarized. Finally, the paper presents the work done showing that OGC standards such as OGC WPS, OGC WMS, OGC WFS, OGC SOS, WaterML2 should be used to create an open interface which permits integrate different building blocks such as demand management systems, decision support systems and others in a common framework. This paper will also observe work done so far in WatERP EU\u27s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project

Implementation of OGC Compliant Framework for Data Integration in Water Distribution System

This paper focuses on implementation of a generic OGC compliant framework to integrate data in Water Supply Distribution Systems using interoperable standards. The architecture of this framework was generic to merge clients’ data irrespective of the data format. The Integration Manager (IM) of the architecture processes the data and transforms it into WaterML 2.0 format and exchange observations using a standard web service (OGC SOS).The contribution of this paper in water industry is the use of OGC Standards. Then, an implementation of a generic framework for real case studies to integrate water dat

Initial analysis of SAR from a cell phone inside a vehicle by numerical computation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of the metallic structures of a realistic car body frame on the specific absorption rate (SAR) produced by a cell phone when a complete human body model is placed at different locations inside the vehicle, and to identify the relevant parameters responsible for these changes. The modeling and analysis of the whole system was conducted by means of computer simulations based on the full wave finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) numerical method. The excitation considered was an 835 MHz 2 dipole located as a handsfree communication device or as a hand-held portable system. We compared the SAR at different planes on the human model, placed inside the vehicle with respect to the free space situation. The presence of the car body frame significantly changes the SAR distributions, especially when the dipole is far from the body. Although the results are not conclusive on this point, this change in SAR distribution is not likely to produce an increase above the limits in current guidelines for partial body exposure, but may be signifi- cant for whole-body exposure. The most relevant change found was the change in the impedance of the dipole, affecting the radiated power. A complementary result from the electromagnetic computations performed is the change in the electromagnetic field distribution inside a vehicle when human bodies are present. The whole vehicle model has been optimized to provide accurate results for sources placed inside the vehicle, while keeping low requirements for computer storage and simulation time.Peer Reviewe

UrbanWater And WatERP: Decision Support Systems For Efficient And Integrated Water Resources Management

In this work we present UrbanWater and WatERP, two EU-FP7 projects with the common objective of designing and developing innovative ICT solutions to integrate real-time knowledge on water demand and supply across water distribution networks. On one hand, WatERP proposes to develop a web-based Open Management Platform (OMP) supported by real-time knowledge on water supply and demand, enabling the entire water distribution system to be viewed in an integrated and customized way. The OMP provides inferred information regarding water supplies, flows, water consumption patterns, water losses, distribution efficiency, and water supply and demand forecasts to the user. This information is stored in a Water Data Warehouse using semantics and open standards (such as WaterML 2.0) which are defined in the ontology developed to ensure interoperability and maximize usability. In addition, external linkages to costs, energy factors, control systems, data acquisition systems, external models, forecasting systems and new data sources are made available for easy integration into the system. On the other hand, UrbanWater proposes to develop an ICT-based platform for efficient and integrated management of urban water resources, incorporating weather prediction and water availability data, household consumption data, and water distribution among others. Its design corresponds to a highly flexible Spatial Decision Support System capable of connecting manifold data sources and data processing modules that enable to (i) effectively estimate water demand in urban water areas to manage water distribution networks in an efficient way; (ii) reduce waste of water and economic losses associated to leakages; (iii) smoothen daily water demand peaks in order to save costs; and (iv) provide an off-line and on-line operation framework that allows defining scenarios of availability and demand to test specific strategies for the distribution network operation

The Catalan Surveillance Network of SARS-CoV-2 in Sewage: design, implementation, and performance

Wastewater-based epidemiology has shown to be an efficient tool to track the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in communities assisted by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The challenge comes when this approach is employed to help Health authorities in their decision-making. Here, we describe the roadmap for the design and deployment of SARSAIGUA, the Catalan Surveillance Network of SARS-CoV-2 in Sewage. The network monitors, weekly or biweekly, 56 WWTPs evenly distributed across the territory and serving 6 M inhabitants (80% of the Catalan population). Each week, samples from 45 WWTPs are collected, analyzed, results reported to Health authorities, and finally published within less than 72 h in an online dashboard ( https://sarsaigua.icra.cat ). After 20 months of monitoring (July 20-March 22), the standardized viral load (gene copies/day) in all the WWTPs monitored fairly matched the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases along the successive pandemic waves, showing a good fit with the diagnosed cases in the served municipalities (Spearman Rho = 0.69). Here we describe the roadmap of the design and deployment of SARSAIGUA while providing several open-access tools for the management and visualization of the surveillance data.The authors wish to thank the staff from all the WWTPs monitored for their help and technical support during the sampling campaigns. The authors acknowledge the funding received from the ACA and the ASPCAT from the Catalan Government (Generalitat de Catalunya). ICRA authors acknowledge the funding provided by the Generalitat de Catalunya through the Consolidated Research Group grants ICRA-ENV 2017 SGR 1124 and ICRA-TiA 2017 SGR 1318. ICRA researchers also thank the funding from the CERCA program of the Catalan Government.Peer reviewe

Chapter AI for Improving the Overall Equipment Efficiency in Manufacturing Industry

Industry 4.0 has emerged as the perfect scenario for boosting the application of novel artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions to industrial process monitoring and optimization. One of the key elements on this new industrial revolution is the hatching of massive process monitoring data, enabled by the cyber-physical systems (CPS) distributed along the manufacturing processes, the proliferation of hybrid Internet of Things (IoT) architectures supported by polyglot data repositories, and big (small) data analytics capabilities. Industry 4.0 paradigm is data-driven, where the smart exploitation of data is providing a large set of competitive advantages impacting productivity, quality, and efficiency key performance indicators (KPIs). Overall equipment efficiency (OEE) has emerged as the target KPI for most manufacturing industries due to the fact that considers three key indicators: availability, quality, and performance. This chapter describes how different AI and ML solutions can enable a big step forward in industrial process control, focusing on OEE impact illustrated by means of real use cases and research project results