Smart Water Management System Using IOT based Sensors

The advancement of technology in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) have grown rapidly over the past years in the field of water management in various context. The work aims to contribute to general process flow of a smart city management specifically in the field of the residential water management system. As well to design a smart water management system for the residential areas that can be implemented not only to a single residential area but to multiple residential areas. This is achieved through implementing sensor-based water flow meter to replace current mechanical water flow gauge. It is as well addressed the need of a common platform to store data that are currently proposed through an additional data acquisition application. Lastly, the work proposes an affordable prototype to measure water flow rate using IOT based sensors to be implemented at large scale and promising usability testing result.


Introduction
With the current technology advancement, many businesses such as the food and beverages industry, clothing industry, transportation industry, and agriculture industry have implemented technology to improve their processes, optimize cost, and in-crease performance.The real estate industry has recently joined the industry 4.0 in building their commercial, residential, and industrial area.With the help of technology real estate businesses can now design and develop areas for commercial, residential, and industrial to be smart, in the sense where the process of gathering, analysing, and evaluating data is automated and can be used with ease.This type of technology is also known as the smart city technology.Smart city technology has been implemented in several areas around, mostly to the commercial and residential areas which is able to monitor various data such as, power management, water management, and waste management.These smart technology helps business users to collect and gather data to be analysed, which then will be used to evaluate for different purposes such as maintenance or to improve their system by designing a more effective and efficient plan.
Therefore, with the new smart city technology, it is possible to apply and implement the smart city technology to the real estate industry such as the residential area to help monitor the conditions of the water management, power management, gas management, waste management, 1324 (2024) 012106 IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1324/1/012106 2 and communication system for every house in the area.In this paper the author will discuss and design the framework for the smart water management system for the residential area which can be use not only in a single residential area but, available to be modified to other residential areas.

Related works
Recent work approached the implementation of smart water management in the precision irrigation system for agriculture using several layered system architectures ranging from application specific, customizable services, and replicable services [1].Although the work supported by a welldeveloped Fiware platform some difficulties still exist in merging different type of sensors' providers.The various sensors that are currently available for smart water management systems are vast with lack of standardized platform [2] which are ranging from Spectro, Kapta, Libelium, and SmartCoast.The immense amount of data provided by the IOT sensors would raise the need of having sufficient data storage.Some of the implementation used cloud storage to store and analyze the information provided by sensors [3,4,5].This approach proven to be reliable and portable to be implemented on the field.Some of these works implement Wi-Fi based connection over GSM for cost efficiency.
A conceptual framework has been developed to ensure homogenous platform and measurement of the system's proficiency [6].This includes instrument layer, property, function, benefit layer, application layer and as well as metrics to value smartness and cyber wellness.The metrics of implementing this in the domestic area has been well developed recently to make sure there will be certain state of the art standard of the water supply system in a certain context [7].The work implemented 15 parameters to monitor and value the implementation of smart water management systems with a confirmation of cloud storage so called cloud service module to act as the connection between gateway module (accommodating all the sensors) and user interface module.
Smart water management could maximize the usage of water and reduce the waste of water.With the help of IoT, smart water management aims at the exploitation of water, at the regional or city level, based on sustainability and self-sufficiency.This exploitation is carried out using innovative technologies, such as information and control technologies and monitoring [8].Challenges in creating a smart water system can be in various and one of the main challenges is from recycling water.Water is present in the environment in the form of a cycle that includes water resources, water use, and recycling and water management also includes flood control [9].
The internet of things, also known as IoT, is the network inside of a device such as sensors to gather data and able to connect and communicate with other devices with the help of the internet.IoT can also be defined as a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic,business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies [10].This means that, data can be collected and gathered automatically and be used by the user without any manual data collecting, where people need to go to the site to collect data, they could use a device to collect the data and send those data with wireless technology.IoT can be implemented almost everywhere, not just in businesses but for scientific research, agricultural industry, and many more departments that requires sensors to collect data.With the present of IoT technology, rather than worrying about collecting and gathering the information to create those products or services, businesses and users now can focus more on their end products or services and sharpening those end results to achieve the best outcome for their customers.IoT uses many types of sensors and instruments to collect data and this instrumentation consists of some basic elements to collect, process, and share data among objects and with the increase in the components in a system such as how to collect, combine, process, and use data effectively, it can become very challenging [11].
As an advancing technology in modern wireless telecommunication, IoT has attracted a lot of attention and is expected to bring benefits to a numerous application in areas including industrial 3 WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) systems, and healthcare systems manufacturing [12].Cloud computing or cloud technology is a set of computer resources that can be accessed by users from anywhere around the world without the need of direct physical interaction.Cloud computing can be used for many different services and the most common uses are for hosting applications or databases.With the availability of hosting databases this gives a huge benefit to business users as they will no longer need a physical hardware to run the database servers thus eliminating the expenses needed for hardware supplies and maintenance to keep the servers up and running.With cloud computing business can save up a lot of cost by changing their fixed cost of server maintenance to variable cost of using cloud computing.Businesses can focus more on their business performance and not worry about the servers as most of the technical activities are being handled by the cloud service provider.These resources can be dynamically reconfigured to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for an optimum resource utilization [13].There are three different service models in cloud computing, which are SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.SaaS, also known as Software as a Service, is a multi-tenant cloud platform and it shares common resources and a single instance of both the object code of an application as well as the underlying database to support multiple customers simultaneously [14].PaaS, also known as Platform as a Service, is a platform provided to developers with all the systems and the environments comprising the system life cycle of developing, testing, deploying, and hosting a sophisticated web applications as a service delivered by a cloud [14].IaaS, also known as Infrastructure as a Service, is a delivery of resources as a service over internet.IaaS is the most flexible compared to SaaS and PaaS, in addition, the key benefit of IaaS is the based-usage payment method, where customers will only pay for the number of resources they use.

Methodology
The proposed work methodology following four main steps starting from collecting metrics parameter from the field and users, developing IOT prototype, application development and evaluation of the system through acquired metrics.The research parameter will be acquired in a qualitative manner where the data will be collected through interviews with a few candidates.The interview will be divided into two parts, the first part of the interview will define what kind of problems these candidates are currently experiencing with the current water management system.The second part of the interview will ask the respondents about the idea of the smart water management system and their opinion on that idea.The interview respondents will be chosen based on their demographic category, if the respondents meet any one of the categories, they will be chosen to attend the interview.These categories are based on the respondents' profession and persona.The age range is determined by the professional category, that is 30 years old and above.
After the interview was conducted, the results will then be analysed by creating an empathy map for each candidate.The empathy map depicts in Figure -2 shows what each respondent feels, thinks, hears, sees, and speaks.It will also describe the pain and gain of each candidate based on the interviews.From the empathy maps, a value proposition was created to show what the value of the product being given to the customer.The value proposition canvas shows overall the pain, gains, and of the interview's respondents which could be concluded as expecting a smart system that could register all data on household water distribution automatically while detecting and predicting anomaly as symptoms of distribution problem.

Discussion of result
The proposed work covers water management in a residential area from detecting problems, forecasting data, and water bill payment.As depicted in Figure -3, the solution requires multiple sensors distributed across the residential area to collect and gather data for water flow rate, water pressure and water quality.These sensors will be connected to a device that allows it to send data with a signal to a 3G module device.The data from the 3G module will then be sent using GPRS, short for General Packet Radio Service, through the internet and finally received by the server.Using the 3G module as describes in Figure -4, it can receive signals from sensors up to a maximum of 50m.So, with a strategical placement of the 3G module, there will not be any unnecessary placement of the 3G module.This can maximize efficiency and cost efficient.One of the main features of this proposed solution is the smart water billing system.This system will eliminate the need of users to periodically checks the water meter of each house whenever they want to bill every house.Because of the smart city management, every house in the residents has already been registered to the database, so the system can determine if a house is occupied or empty.With every house that is occupied, the system will check the monthly water usage of each house which then will be used to bill the water usage of the house.Another feature of the smart water management system is the problem detection.This feature allows user to be informed about incoming problems that might occur, so that the users could prepare beforehand and try to prevent the problems from happening as described in Figure -5.This prototype will get the data from the sensor and store the data into a database.Data could later be used by the user to do multiple activities such as: monitoring the water flow rate, generating water billing info to the residents, and can be used by the system to be forecasted and produce future data for planning ahead and for maintenance of the hardware.The hardware that are used in the prototype depicted in The implementation of the Arduino water flow sensor is coded using the C/C++ programming language describe in Figure -7.The following lines of code are the setup for the water flow sensor by declaring variables and initializing serial connection for reporting values back to the host.As listed in Table-1, the Hall-effect sensor is connected to pin 2 which uses interrupt 0. The system uses 5 volts that could be acquired externally or by common solar panel battery.This is configured to trigger on a falling state change -as described in Table-1, which is a transition from high state to low state.The lines of code are the loop function in Figure -7, where the code will always run in a loop for as long as the Arduino board is online.This code will give an output once every second and calculates the cumulative millilitres of the flowing water using the water flow rate per second.The code snippet in Figure -7 as well increments the pulse counter used in the function.The pulse counter is used to calculate the water flow rate per second and after each loop is finished the pulse counter will reset to zero so that it can start incrementing again.The database implementation uses additional layer of API to extract data from communication and storing it to the database.This extra layer of application act as the intermediary between IOT sensors ports and the data layer.All sensors' data are acquired from communication port as both text and numbers and stored in a RDBMS.The work implemented local RDBMS that could easily replicated on the cloud.The evaluation method that will be used is the System Usability Scale (SUS) and discussion.In this evaluation, the participants went through and tested the web application prototype to scale the usability testing and all of the sessions of the discussion and testing the web application are all done through online meeting.
The evaluation was conducted with the respondents that did the first interview at the first stage of the design thinking process.This is because the respondents would need to know the background of the objective and to know what type of web application they are testing.To start the usability testing the first session the participants have to do were to use and go through the prototype.This session is to let the participants get familiar with the web application and to know what the features of this web application are.The usability testing consists of 10 statements, which have to be ranked from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree) based on how much they agree with the statements.The statements are as follows: • I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
• I found the system unnecessarily complex.
• I thought the system was easy to use.
• I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system.
• I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
• I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
• I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
• I found the system very cumbersome to use.
• I felt very confident using the system.
• I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.After letting the participants test the prototype, they are later given the survey for the evaluation using the System Usability Scale standard survey.There are a total of 5 respondents that did the evaluation survey, and the results are as follows: The result of the usability in Table-2 describes a good average mark of 72 for the web application prototype design.The prototype design is intuitive, the respondents does not have a confusion on how to navigate through the web application, however, there are still a few areas where it needed to be improved such the functions of the buttons that needs training or understanding to use it.

Conclusions
The work proposed a technology embedded process flow of a smart city management specifically in the field of the residential water management system, which capable to be implemented in multiple residential areas.It uses water flow rate sensors connected to embedded system with promising result within the urban area.Qualitative methodology was used in this work to evaluate the outcome of its solution.Future work would include more sensors such as pressure and water quality to add to the big data analysis.Prediction model would be as well the focus of the work's next step after successfully collecting enough data of approximately 5000 inputs, to build a robust predictive analysis model.
In conclusion, this work has been overall positive, which aim at designing a system suitable for managing a water system using technology that can automate data gathering and using a webbased application to analyse and use the data.Based on the qualitative analysis using interviews and using the design thinking methodology, it is safe to say that the solution given into this was accepted and the customer would like to use the web-based application.

Figure- 1 Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Methodology of the proposed work.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Value proposition canvas of the system.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. High level model of the proposed system.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Proposed flow of locating water problem in the system.

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Code embedded into the IoT sensors data acquisition device.