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Due to the increasing demand for water supply of urban areas, treatment and supply plants are becoming important to ensure availability and quality of this essential resource for human health. Enabling technologies of Industry 4.0 have the potential to improve performances of treatment plants. In this paper, after reviewing contributions in scientific literature on I4.0 technologies in dam operations, a study carried out on a Brazilian dam is presented and discussed. The main purpose of the study is to evaluate the economic, environmental, and social advantages achieved through the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in dam operations. Unlike automation that just respond to commands, AI uses a large amount of data training to make computers able to take the best decision. The current study involved a company that managed six reservoirs for treatment systems supplying water to almost ten million people at the metropolitan area of São Paulo City. Results of the study show that AI adoption could lead to economic gain in figures around US$ 51,000.00 per year, as well as less trips between sites and less overtime extra costs on the main operations. Increasing gates maneuvers agility result in significant environmental gains with savings of about 4.32 billion L of water per year, enough to supply 73,000 people. Also, decreasing operational vehicle utilization results in less emissions. Finally, the AI implementation improved the safety of dam operations, resulting in social benefits such as the flood risk mitigation in cities and the health and safety of operators.

The adoption of Cleaner Production (CP) consists in taking preventive actions of one or more Cleaner Production practices; the most common are the reduction of emissions, efficient use of water, energy, and reuse of waste. This research identified in the literature 31 Cleaner Production practices and, through a survey in multinational textile industries and verified by specialists, was identified and evaluated the level of implementation of each Cleaner Production practices and link them to small, medium and large companies, so, this was the aim of this research. This study used statistical test analysis of variance. The main results were that small companies are motivated to implement Cleaner Production practices solely to reduce costs, and some small companies do not even know the concept of Cleaner Production. Medium-sized companies receive pressures to implement Cleaner Production practices to develop an environmental management system and participate in the competitive exportation market. In addition, ultimately, large companies have levels of implementation of the Cleaner Production practices significantly higher than small- and medium-sized enterprises due to the need to continually invest in their brand to increase market share. Efficient use of water is a Cleaner Production practice adopted by large- and medium-sized companies. These results enable business executives to perform benchmarking using levels of implementation of Cleaner Production practices according to the company size.