A Novel Architecture for the Smart Management of Wastewater Treatment Plants

The primary goal of a wastewater treatment system is to take care of the environment as well as of people health by purifying sewage water. In urban and industrial environments, wastewater management is non-trivial since it has to deal with abnormal fluctuations in incoming water flows (due to rainwater or human and industrial sewage) that may cause failures and outages to the entire purification process. This paper proposes a solution based on a smart system to ensure the clean water quality by keeping the wastewater treatment system efficient. It is able to constantly and real time monitoring both the purity of the water and the inlet and outlet flows enforcing on them proper policies based on the monitored values thus acting as a cyber-physical system (CPS). The raw data, generated by an Environmental Internet of Things (EIoT) platform part of a real case study implemented in Briatico (Italy), is collected and hosted in a server that can process and manage real-time information about the plant.