(A.) Policy and legislation
(A.1) Policy objectives
Global water challenges are critical for our society, including alterations in water quality and availability, the frequency of floods and droughts due to climate and other environmental changes, pollution trends and increased competition in water uses. Currently, these cause serious problems in 11% of the EU territory and this is expected to increase to 30% by 203050. Moreover, the usage of water is a key enabler for urban and rural industrial activities that is expected to increase by 55% in 205051 52 53. It is fundamental to improve integrated water resource protection and management in the man-made or natural environments by addressing integrated water and wastewater management, water reuse, circular economy, water system monitoring and reporting, pollution reduction and prevention, smart irrigation, resilience in the field of floods and droughts, leakage reduction and prevention, water governance, and awareness raising of the true value of water by all stakeholders.
For these reasons, it is essential to develop and implement robust, smart, cost-effective, efficient and tailored water management systems, solutions and multi-sectoral governance models in Europe and globally. Advanced digital technologies comprise transversal common topics: big data-analytics, data sharing, privacy management, real-time and near-real-time monitoring, sensors, smart devices, decision support systems and water management tools, IoT, cloud and fog computing platforms, artificial intelligence and machine learning, algorithms, augmented reality and simulation tools, image and streaming data processing capabilities, reporting and consumer awareness tools and applications, cyber-security, system interoperability and standardisation solutions. These networked, intelligent systems help make better use of energy, avoid unnecessary water losses and minimize the consumption of resources.
Despite a promising technological scenario, currently the water domain is characterised by a low level of maturity concerning the integration and standardisation of ICT technology, its business processes and the relevant implementation in the legislative framework. Although this could be attributed partly to the fragmentation of the water sector, as well as to the lack of organisational and financial resources to match priorities and needs, the development of system standards is nevertheless a key enabling factor for smart water solutions that ensures interoperability of solutions through promoting common meta-data structures, standard protocols and interoperable (open) interfaces instead of proprietary ones. The main action is to foster the creation of a Digital Single Market for water services, to promote the transition of the ICT technologies and standards towards large-scale pilots and to expand the market uptake of technologies.
In parallel, the priority is to accelerate the implementation of EU policies54 55 and initiatives 56 relating to water and environment while also contributing to policy relating to the Energy Union, climate action and the Digital Single Market in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 6 ‘Clean water and sanitation’, SDG 11 ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’, SDG 12 ‘Responsible consumption and production’, SDG 13 ‘Climate action’, Paris Agreement and United Nation climate conference.
(A.2) EC perspective and progress report
The European Commission is expected to work towards the definition of long-term regulatory strategy concerning the adoption of smart water technologies in coordination with relevant stakeholders and standard organisations, to ensure smooth digitalisation of water services over the next decade.
At European level, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and associated water legislation are addressing water protection. A Commission Proposal for a revised Drinking Water Directive (2018/83/EC) has been adopted on 1 February 2018. A roadmap on the Fitness
Check (evaluation) of the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC), the Floods Directive (2007/60/EC), and on the evaluation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (91/271/EEC) were published in October 2017. DG ENV launched several public consultations e.g. regarding the minimum quality requirements for reused water in the EU and the strategic approach to pharmaceuticals in the environment. Water reuse, water quality, risk management in smart water solutions, circular economy action plan as well as plan for the next decade have been considered recently.
(A.3) References
- COM/2016/0176 final: ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market
- COM/2016/289: Addressing geo-blocking and other forms of discrimination based on customers’ nationality, place of residence or place of establishment within the internal market and amending.
- COM/2015/627: Ensuring the cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market.
- COM/2015/120: The Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive: Actions towards the ‘good status’ of EU water and to reduce flood risks.
- STUDY 2013: European Parliament: Ubiquitous Development of the Digital Single Market.
- COM/2011/202: Smart Grids: from innovation to deployment
- COM/2007/414: Addressing the challenge of water scarcity and droughts
- Directive 2002/21/EC: common regulatory framework for electronic communications networks and services (Framework Directive)
- Water reuse: Commission proposes measures to make it easier and safer for agricultural irrigation (8)
- Commission reviews progress made in water quality and flood risk management (9)
- EU budget for 2021-2027: Commission welcomes the provisional agreement on funding for the environment and climate action (10)
- Closing the loop: Commission delivers on Circular Economy Action Plan (11)
(B.) Requested actions
The requested actions towards digitalisation of the water sector and implementation of ICT are defined in the scope of the ICT4Water Cluster. Some of them are related to the policy of the European Commission and other relevant bodies like standardisation organisations:
Action 1 Guidelines for the definition of Smart Water Grids, powered by IoT technologies and standards, which contributes to decentralised, circular water and information flow. The concept of the Smart Water Grid is expected to be developed in the framework of ICT4Water Cluster running projects. Many standard organizations such as ETSI, CEN/CENELEC, AIOTI, OGC, OpenFog, BVDA are expected to contribute in coordination with the EC.
Action 2 Guidelines and collaborative work among key actors (associations, alliances, SDOs, etc.) for the definition of Water Big Data standardisation frameworks, which contributes to implementing smart water best practices and an interoperability framework for smart water services. Special emphasis is made on key aspects of a big data platform such as integration, analytics, visualisation, development, workload optimisation, security and governance. ICT4Water Cluster uses the testbeds established in the scope of the running projects to prove working concepts. There is a need of coordination with other sector programmes supported by EC like environment, communication and content management, humanitarian operations, space etc.
Action 3 Selection and integration of the widely accepted technologies in each class among all the range of suitable standards and ontologies ensuring the interoperability at data and communication level as SAREF for example. Standard organisations like ETSI and CEN/CENELEC have to define the framework that allows the producers, providers, stakeholders and end-users to develop the smart water services next decade. The process needs to be in conformance to the policy set by the European Commission.
Action 4 Definition of open models and open data through interoperable platforms. The first steps as a policy decision are made by the EC. Then, standard organisations such as ETSI have to define the architectures, data models, ontologies, standard interfaces and protocols to allow data sharing, platforms integration and interoperability.
Action 5 Incentives for the adoption of Open Data standards, in order to be able to provide information in a transparent and up to date manner. This action is related to the policy of the EC but needs to be developed taking into account the security. Citizen’s awareness is an important issue and is related to the developed open data models by standard organisations in Action 4.
(C.) Activities and additional information
(C.1) Related standardisation activities
CEN/CENELEC/ETSI
Information on the activities of the CEN-CLC-ETSI Coordination Group on Smart Meters, and related Technical Committees, is available here: https://www.cencenelec.eu/standards/Sectorsold/SustainableEnergy/SmartMeters/Pages/default.aspx
A European Technical Report comprising a software and hardware open architecture for utility meters that supports secure bidirectional communication upstream and downstream through standardised interfaces and data exchange formats and allows advanced information and management and control systems for consumers and service suppliers. The Report identifies a functional reference architecture for communications in smart metering systems. and the standards relevant to meeting the technical / data communications requirements of Mandate M/441, in particular to assist the active participation of consumers. The architecture has been developed drawing on existing and planned implementations, but its generic nature should enable it to support future different implementations.
The Report is available at ftp://ftp.cen.eu/cen/Sectors/List/Measurement/Smartmeters/CENCLCETSI_TR50572.pdf
The latest work programme is available at ftp://ftp.cencenelec.eu/EN/EuropeanStandardisation/Fields/EnergySustainability/Management/SmartMeters/Workprogramme2017.pdf
OGC®
HY_FEATURES. Reference model defining real-world water-objects and the way they relate to each other according to hydro-science domain defined by semantics and network topology.
http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/hydrofeatswg
WaterML2.0. Standard information model for the representation of water observations data, with the intent of allowing the exchange of such data sets across information systems, using existing OGC standards.
http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/waterml2.0swg
ETSI
SAREF Investigation for Water (DTR/SmartM2M-103547) Determining the requirements for an initial semantic model for the Water domain based on a set of use cases and from available existing data models.
Industry Specification Group “City Digital Profile” (ISG CDP) was doing work relevant to city standards for water management, but the ISG was closed September 2019.
https://portal.etsi.org/Portals/0/TBpages/CDP/Docs/ISG_CDP_ToR_DG_Approved_20171011.pdf
CEN
See CEN/CENELEC/ETSI entry above
INSPIRE
INSPIRE Directive. Reference EU architecture for data sets sharing between EU countries.
ISO/IEC
Generic Sensor networks Application Interfaces (ISO/IEC 30128). International Standard that depicts operational requirements for generic sensor network applications, description of sensor network capabilities, and mandatory and optional interfaces between the applications.
https://webstore.iec.ch/preview/info_isoiec30128%7Bed1.0%7Den.pdf
https://www.iso.org/standard/53248.html
ITU-T
The ITU-T Focus Group on Smart Water Management (FG-SWM), issued a series of deliverables including the following:
- The Role of ICT in Water Resource Management
- Smart Water Management Stakeholders Map
- Smart water management project classification
- Smart water management stakeholder challenges and mitigation report on the KPI to assess the impact of the use of ICT in SWM
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/swm/Pages/default.aspx
The ITU-T Focus Group on Environmental Efficiency for Artificial Intelligence and other Emerging Technologies (FG-AI4EEE) will develop technical reports and technical specifications to address issues related to environmental efficiency, water and energy consumption. More information on ITU FG-AI4EE is available at: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/ai4ee/Pages/default.aspx.
Recommendation ITU-T F.747.6 elaborates on the “Requirements for water quality assessment services using ubiquitous sensor networks (USNs)” https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-F.747.6-201410-I/en
ITU-T SG20 is currently working on draft Recommendation on “Framework of monitoring of water system for smart fire protection” (Y.water-SFP). https://www.itu.int/ITU-T/workprog/wp_item.aspx?isn=16399
ISO
ISO/TC 282: Standardisation of water re-use of any kind and for any purpose. It covers both centralised and decentralised or on-site water re-uses, direct and indirect ones as well as intentional and unintentional ones. It includes technical, economic, environmental, and societal aspects of water re-use. Water re-use comprises a sequence of the stages and operations involved in uptaking, conveyance, processing, storage, distribution, consumption, drainage, and other actions related to the handling of wastewater, including the water re-use in repeated, cascaded, and recycled ways.
https://www.iso.org/committee/4856734.html
PSA
WITS Standard Protocol. Standard method dedicated to water industry telemetry control and monitoring. This standard protocol makes interoperable equipment from different manufacturers by using features of the DNP3 protocol to satisfy water industry specific functional requirements.
OneM2M
OneM2M was launched in 2012 as a global initiative to ensure the most efficient deployment of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) and it includes several SDOs and representatives of different industry sectors. The latest technical specifications can be found on their website http://www.onem2m.org/technical/latest-drafts
The oneM2M standardize supports a multi domains/solutions integration that supports Water Management digitalization requirements, and in particular the integration with the other services and system that are building the Digital Single Market (e.g. the integration with Smart Cities and with Smart Agriculture solutions). The SAREF ontology makes use of oneM2M as communication framework (ETSI TS 103 264 (Reference Ontology and oneM2M Mapping) and a specific Smart Watering extension is under development (ETSI TS 103 410-10) and will be available by the end of 2019 https://www.etsi.org/standards-search
AIOTI
High Level Reference Architecture Reference ICT architecture and semantic data model based on the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard for representing IoT entities and services. This reference architecture is transversal to several domains including water. https://aioti.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/AIOTI-HLA-R3-June-2017.pdf
W3C
Web of Thing Working Group RDF and Linked Data vocabularies to reduce the fragmentation generated in the IoT devices. Moreover, this group is also focused on providing best practices and corresponding APIs to enable semantic interoperability within the Smart City.
Iot-Schema.org. Extension of schema.org data model towards modelling IoT entities with focus on energy, transport, and water infrastructures.
50 https://goo.gl/5H76T1, “EC (2015). The Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Floods Directive (FD): Actions towards the ‘good status’ of EU water and to reduce flood risks”
51 https://goo.gl/e2TZvT, “OECD(2017). Aid for Trade at a Glance 2017”
52 https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/initiatives/ares-2017-5128184_en, EC (2017). “Fitness check of the Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive.“
53 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/flood_risk/implem.htm, EC (2017). “The EU Floods Directive”
54 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/index_en.htm
55 EIP Water: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/innovationpartnership/ and https://www.eip-water.eu/about
56 ICT4Water cluster: www.ict4water.eu/ , Action Plan for a DSM for Water Services on the discussion platform Futurium: https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/content/ict4water-roadmaps-action-plan