Challenges and solutions for advanced sensing of water infrastructures in urban environments

Abstract

Our hypothesis is that in order to extract relevant information from a sensor network placed to monitor or control urban behavior, the data received has to be first manipulated to determine the most impactful components and then analyzed. At urban construction sites, huge numbers of automatic monitoring sensors are installed in the influence zone of the construction along the city, above ground and underground. We calculated that quite often sensors are damaged or cannot transfer their data temporarily. In these cases, safety-relevant data is lost quite often making data interpretation impossible. This paper presents a method to solve more efficiently the often occurring `missing data' problem when monitoring under difficult urban environmental conditions, compared to existing solutions. The main contribution of the paper consists in evaluating the challenges of monitoring urban environments and designing an advanced sensing system for water infrastructures.