A key problem in water management is the lack of decision support tools that present meaningful and personalized information about usage, price, and availability of water in an intuitive and interactive way to end users. As a result, end-users are not aware of their water usage patterns and the impact of their consumption behaviour on water and energy. This lack of awareness is a barrier for behavioural change.
The goal of WATERNOMICS is to provide personalised and actionable water information to individual households, companies and cities in an intuitive and effective manner at a time-scale relevant for decision making.
Waternomics uses a holistic approach considering all the stages of water usage. On a hardware level, new sensor technology for leakage detection and measuring water flows will be combined with existing infrastructure. Collected data will be combined and made available to various applications, each targeted at a specific user group. A methodology will be developed to help water managers with the implementation of a water information system and new designed business models will ensure sustainable project results.
To validate if the developed technology, methodology and services indeed enable behavioural change, pilots in three different environments will be organized. On Linate Airport near Milan, the Waternomics platform will be tested in a corporate environment with a mix of staff and passengers. In the municipality of Thermi in Greece, a group of households will use Waternomics services for a longer period of time. Finally, in the pilot in Galway, Ireland, the project will investigate how Waternomics services are perceived in a public building.
