Smart water management thanks to fog computing
The evolution of the Internet of Things and the huge amount of data that it generates far from the data centers creates increasing pressure on long-distance network links, and may also lead to significant responsiveness issues for IoT-enabled services. In view of that, fog computing is emerging as an approach to make IoT-enabled services more responsive and efficient, by moving data processing closer to IoT devices and users (we talked about this technology in an interesting article).
Giants in the ICT sector like Cisco, Huawei and IBM are heavily investing into this innovation line, which is expected to have a major impact on several application domains and to reach a worldwide market value of around $750 billion by 2025, after growing at a rate of 55.5%.
Fueled by these promising statistics, in 2017 the European Commission approved and funded, under the H2020 MSCA programme, the FogGuru project whose aim is to deliver a 3-year industrial doctorate programme for training the next generation of European fog computing experts.
The project involves eight early-stage researchers (ESRs), coordinated by a consortium composed by two prestigious universities (University of Rennes 1 and the Technical University of Berlin), a leading education organisation (EIT Digital Rennes) the innovation center of the municipality of València (Las Naves) and a deep-tech Norwegian company, Elastisys and, of course, us: U-Hopper!
Over the last two years, the researchers have been designing and prototyping generic fog computing platforms and fog-enabled services for a wide range of application scenarios, including the use of this technology for smart water management; specifically, for the detection of abnormal water consumption patterns (which may well indicate a leak or a potential fraud).
The opportunity for ESRs to apply their research in a real-life setting arrived in November 2019 when the project partner and innovation hub, Las Naves, put the students in contact with the company in charge of water management in the city of València, EMIVASA.
This collaboration has translated in an excellent opportunity not only for the researchers, but also for the Spanish company, which had the opportunity to experience firsthand the benefits of fog computing technologies – in this case, bringing tangible ecological and economic benefits thanks to a better management of precious natural resources (just like water that is a scarce resource is such an area like the South of Spain).
After one year of experiment, on September 29, 2020, the FogGuru researchers will officially present the experiment results by organizing a free event open to the public. The entire event will be hosted by Las Naves, and it will also be live-streamed on its official YouTube channel.
Are you interested? Register here! We look forward to seeing you connected!
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