Welcome to Smart Water Network Manager (SWNM)

Water loss reduction will play a critical role to improve the efficiency of water resources; especially, in countries like South Africa where water loss cost the country more and more every year. However, it will not be enough to rely only on traditional approaches to solve the problem of water loss. Therefore, more advanced systems and techniques need to be developed and utilized.

A multidisciplinary consortium of national and international research institutes has been established to develop state-of-the-art techniques, algorithms and models and prompt current and future integration of ICT in water sector to develop an advanced system that is able to mitigate the problem of water loss.

Smart CSIR Water Campus

Smart-Sense devices have been installed in the CSIR water network (water meters and pressure sensors) to provide real-time monitoring of the water flow and pressure. The pilot consists of two types of networks; private network using our own LoRa gateway and public network through Comsol LoRaWAN network.

Data Capturing

Data capturing with Siemens' industry tested SIMATIC RTU3030C. It can operate locations, it is battery powered, and it communicates data via mobile networks.

Water Consumption Graphs

Display the water consumption in a selected period of time, where accumulative or instantaneous graphs can be displayed. Furthermore, graphs can be displayed to show the current consumption so far in the current day, week and month with the water consumption cost.

Monthly Consumption Comparison

Displays the comparison of the total monthly water consumption for the selected meter. Furthermore, the bar graphs can display as many months depending on the selected start and end month.

Water Meter Dashboard

Provides information about the connected water meters, such as current meter reading, water consumption in the current and last day, week or month, as well as the status of sensoring devices (online/offline).

Real-Time Dynamic Hydraulic Model

We are currently developing a real-time dynamic hydraulic model based control system connected to near real-time sensing and actuation capability on the water distribution network (WDN) as an effective approach to implementing an efficient, reliable and adaptive WDN.

For more details please see Dynamic-Hydraulic-Model.

Smart Networks

The dynamic hydraulic model (DHM) requires an efficient and secure network in place to operate efficiently. Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) and other enabling technologies such as Fog computing, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Artificial Intelligent (AI) can be utilized to build the required Smart Networks to enable the real-time monitoring and control mechanism for DHM.

For more details please see Smart Networks.