The Terrassa City Council is on the path towards the digital city, investing in the digital transformation of the services offered, to ensure a higher quality of these services and therefore the improvement of the quality of life of its inhabitants. To achieve the proposed objective it is essential to improve governance from the transversal work between the different services of the city council and the use of the data they use. In this direction, from the Terrassa Digital City service, in collaboration with the company TAIGUA, has started a pilot project on the digital transformation of the water meters, with the main objective of improving the decision-making in the use of water in the city of Terrassa and offer more data in the study of its infrastructure, allowing to optimize the use of water during times of drought and the energy use given the current energy and supply crisis that we are facing today, apart from identifying weaknesses in the infrastructure.
This pilot project proposes a change in the way of measuring the water used in the city, which in recent years has been measured manually every quarter, now with the pilot project, through the installation of 220 meters, the measurement of the consumption of these meters has been automated.
In order to have connectivity between the installed sensors, it has been decided to use the IoT network deployed in Terrassa, based on LoRaWAN technologies, which is a specification of LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network). This technology offers great telecommunication coverage and uses a low power, which is sufficient to transfer the data transmitted by the meters, which are given in the form of numbers. In the other hand, this technology is very economical and does not involve costs for any operator.
To ensure an adequate coverage between telecommunications, a total of 10 gateways have been installed in public facilities to connect to the sensors and send the data to the servers where they are managed; moreover, their transmission power is equivalent to the one of a cell phone. The data is encrypted twice, in the data itself and in the communication, thus offering high security.
An interconnection is made between the LoraWan network and the Barcelona Provincial Council’s SmartRegion urban management technology platform and through Node-RED, a transformation server, the data is extracted, which arrives fully encoded, in order to give this data a structure and integrate it into Sentilo, the city platform used, which allows us to have a centralized repository of the data.
The Node-RED system can function as a Complex Event Processor (CEP), which aims to apply rules that allow decision making and execution of actions in an automated way, although it is not used in this pilot project but in the future this application can be integrated into the project.
More information:
Taigua, website: https://taigua.cat/es/
LoRaWAN website, about architecture:
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/architecture/
LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network), Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPWAN
Sentilo website:
https://www.sentilo.io/wordpress/
Node-RED website:
Complex Event Processing (CEP), Wikipedia:
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