Applications of Smart Water Management Systems: A Literature Review

Abstract

Issues such as climate change, water scarcity, population growth, and distribution losses have stimulated the use of new technologies to manage water resources. This is how the concept of smart water management emerged as a subcategory of the concept of smart cities. This article aimed first to identify the applications of smart water-management systems described in academic articles either as applications in development or as applications already implemented or as future trends; and, second, to classify them according to the processes in the value chain of public water supply services. To this end, a systematic review of the literature was carried out, in which 100 mentions of applications were identified in 62 selected articles; then, the mentions were grouped into 10 categories. The most frequent application categories were smart meters, implementation models and architectures, and loss management. Among the processes of the value chain, applications in processes of distribution and water use were highly predominant. The lack of detail about the integration between the different applications for a smart water-management system was pointed out as a limitation and an opportunity for future research development, especially in terms of a technological roadmap study based on the relationship between smart meters and loss management.