Toward A Sustainable Cyber-Physical System Architecture for Urban Water Supply System

Abstract

The growth of urbanization has induced tremendous difficulties for fundamental resources, environment, and city management. Miscellaneous traditional infrastructures cannot keep up with the increasing requirements of residents. Among them, the urban water supply system (UWSS), as the foothold of all modern life, plays a key point in sustainable city development. To address these challenges, we invited the concepts from Cyber-Physical System (CPS). CPS tangles physical and cyber spaces together on different spatial and temporal scales in order to provide a systematic solution for UWSS. In this paper, we form up a general architecture for UWSS based on CPS concepts. It maps a five-level hierarchical architecture including connection, conversion, cyber, cognition, and configuration. This architecture covers the whole UWSS process, from water source management, treatment to the distribution networks. We designed the working mechanism considering data management, information processing, and knowledge generation and refinement. On top of this architecture, we propose a set of indices to compare and evaluate alternative UWSS by taking into account water supply quantity, quality, and sustainability features. For a case study, we present our experiences in a Norwegian city, named Ålesund. It was admitted to the United Nations Smart City program in 2019, especially for Smart Water design. In our practice, we have deployed related sensors across the local UWSS and corresponding methods for related public services. The preliminary results have shown the feasibility and improvement of UWSS efficiency with the proposed architecture.