Existing stormwater systems require significant investments to meet challenges imposed by climate change, rapid urbanization, and evolving regulations. There is an unprecedented opportunity to improve urban water quality by equipping stormwater systems with low-cost sensors and controllers. This will transform their operation from static to adaptive, permitting them to be instantly "redesigned" to respond to individual storms and evolving land uses.
Abstract-Leveraging recent advances in technologies surrounding the Internet of Things, "smart" water systems are poised to transform water resources management by enabling ubiquitous real-time sensing and control. Recent applications have demonstrated the potential to improve flood forecasting, enhance rainwater harvesting, and prevent combined sewer overflows. However, adoption of smart water systems has been hindered by a limited number of proven case studies, along with a lack of guidance on how smart water systems should be built. To this end, we review existing solutions, and introduce open storman open-source, end-to-end platform for real-time monitoring and control of watersheds. Open storm includes (i) a robust hardware stack for distributed sensing and control in harsh environments (ii) a cloud services platform that enables system-level supervision and coordination of water assets, and (iii) a comprehensive, web-based "how-to" guide, available on open-storm.org, that empowers newcomers to develop and deploy their own smart water networks. We illustrate the capabilities of the open storm platform through two ongoing deployments: (i) a high-resolution flash-flood monitoring network that detects and communicates flood hazards at the level of individual roadways and (ii) a real-time stormwater control network that actively modulates discharges from stormwater facilities to improve water quality and reduce stream erosion. Through these case studies, we demonstrate the real-world potential for smart water systems to enable sustainable management of water resources.
The real‐time control of urban watersheds is now being enabled by a new generation of “smart” and connected technologies. By retrofitting stormwater systems with sensors and valves, it becomes possible to adapt entire watersheds dynamically to individual storms. A catchment‐scale control algorithm is introduced, which abstracts an urban watershed as a linear integrator delay dynamical system, parameterizes it using physical watershed characteristics, and then controls network flows using a Linear Quadratic Regulator. The approach is simulated on a 4‐km2 urban headwater catchment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, demonstrating the gains of a stormwater system that can adaptively balance between flood mitigation and flow reduction. We introduce an equivalence analysis and illustrate the performance of the controlled watershed across large events (30‐year storms) to show the uncontrolled passive watershed can only match it during smaller events (10‐year storm). For these smaller events, the storage volume of the controlled storage nodes (ponds, basins, and wetlands) could be reduced as much as 50% and still achieve the same performance of the controlled watershed. A controller placement analysis is also carried out, whereby all possible combinations of controlled sites are simulated across a wide spectrum of design storms. We show that the control of every storage node may not be needed in a watershed, but rather that in our case study a small subset (30%) of the overall watershed can be controlled in coordination to achieve outcomes that match a fully controlled system, even when tested across a long‐term rainfall record and under noisy sensor measurements.
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