An IoT based reference architecture for smart water management processes

Water is a vital resource for life, and its management is a key issue nowadays. Information and communications technology systems for water control are currently facing interoperability problems due to the lack of support of standardization in monitory and control equipment. This problem affects various processes in water management, such as water consumption, distribution, system identification and equipment maintenance. OPC UA (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control Unified Architecture) is a platform independent service-oriented architecture for the control of processes in the logistic and manufacturing sectors. Based on this standard we propose a smart water management model combining Internet of Things technologies with business processes coordination and decision support systems. We provide an architecture for sub-system interaction and a detailed description of the physical scenario in which we will test our implementation, allowing specific vendor equipment to be manageable and interoperable in the specific context of water management processes.