Tel Aviv Combats Two Water Challenges with One Solution

In recent years, heavy storms have brought massive flooding to Israel. Deadly events that often took utilities by surprise. They were relying on manual alerts from citizens just calling the city center. Sometimes they send their own pickup trucks, you know, to what they call the high-risk areas in which they know that every season they have problems. In 2021, the coastal city of Halan just sailed. of Tel Aviv decided to change that. So they decided to upgrade their existing infrastructure with IoT. The city deployed dozens of IECA's Wavelet Edge device in creeks throughout its sewer network. Wavelet is a logger with edge computing capabilities, which collects data from sensors related to water quality and flow. It then analyzes and consolidates that data at the edge before sending notifications and alerts over a cellular network to a software platform. We developed over the years the ability across the board, meaning from the Edge device. The Weblet Edge device was designed with its operating system to accept many different sensors and to power them, clean the data, communicate with them. It was a heavy lifting on the embedded software side. We did everything under battery constraints and things like that. Then we built the IoT platform, the FAI field, asset intelligence platform, into accepting and... managing different data streams, and then on the way to the data utilization tools that we build them to be application agnostic, meaning we train the AI -based models, et cetera, to be very, very flexible. That flexibility has not only enabled Halon to monitor potential flooding in its sewer network, but also monitor water contamination in its drinking water network. That's because the device is compatible with any sensor, which directly plugs into the wavelet device. To monitor drinking water quality, the device connects. sensors in wells that measure water pressure chlorine and pH levels the wavelets edge computing capability then analyzes that information to identify the presence of corrosive gases and chemicals it used to be days that you take pressure monitoring vendor a level monitoring vendor B I don't know quality monitoring vendors see and then you had like a very complicated IT challenges to connect them all together into a data lake or not on the platform etc they see it like as a great benefit for them to We have one vendor that provide or one solution that provides different data streams, manage it properly and provide them with the tools to utilize them under the same roof. So we do see a trend. It also become almost a requirement now. It's a trend made possible by edge computing, a technology we've typically seen deployed within smart cameras. These cameras use analytics at the edge to spot everything from flooding to sewage events while also measuring weather data and temperature. It does so without constantly sending data to the cloud and hence requires less bandwidth and energy. According to IECA CEO, as IoT sensors embed more capabilities, utilities have less of a need for smart cameras. So in the public space, we see a trend that started with cameras and now it's going back to sensors that doesn't have any visuals because of anonymity and they still need to know the data. So we have cameras as well, by the way, in IECA as far as the sensors, but we see more and more move back into the what you call real in situ sensors with cameras as a backup only in some unique cases in which they need to see some overview of some emergency relief things so it's interesting trends we see in the camera area it comes as utilities up their investments in iot solutions particularly in wastewater in many many utilities or many regions wastewater network is considered as other locations so you need explosive proof instrumentation so the communication device the sensor you need to be explosive proof from the hardware perspective it makes everything much more complicated so the idea that utilities could add to their infrastructure capabilities with remotely controlled iot devices is appealing and you don't need edge computing to do it this is a look at a previous story we covered in marseille france saram a subsidiary of the french utility suez tapped on green city's end to deploy ultrasonic sensors and its drains often are clogged by sewage. The sensors detect waste levels in the drain and send alerts over a LoRa network to a platform. From here, data gets analyzed in the cloud and presented to the team. Saram previously carried out 50 ,000 physical inspections each year and was on a mission to change that. In fact, these digital technologies allow us to anticipate the problems and, in particular, will allow us to clean the avaloirs who need it. before it doesn't rain on the city to avoid being released in the river. To set up the context, at the beginning, the agents started with a paper tour on the ground and passed on all the avalors of Marseille to see if they were clean or dirty. Today, with the avalors connected, the advantage is that we have a 100 % digital solution. The agents have their smartphones or tablet on the ground and go to the avalors that we have. IoT has transformed Saram's operations and has contributed to a cleaner city, the type of outcomes Tel Aviv is also hoping to accomplish with its solution, along with many other benefits thanks to devices powered by edge computing and advanced algorithms. For more trends on Smart Water, be sure to stick with Current Insights.