(3 min read)
Due to climate change, the Attica region in Greece, an area that includes the cities of Athens and Piraeus, two metropolitan cities home to more than 5 million people combined, has been affected by sudden, severe rainfalls. Their unpredictable behaviour, accompanied with unprecedented volume of rainfall, has led to catastrophic surface floodings attributed to the low-capacity, imperfect, ill-maintained and poorly cleaned drainage networks.
Surface floodings in Attica region, Greece (image source: https://www.tovima.com/society/storm-elena-brings-christmas-chaos-to-attica-and-evia/)
Fuelics, a deep tech IoT company based in Greece, implements a solution that enhances underground rainwater drainage networks with smart monitoring capabilities. The solution utilizes a smart edge computing sensor and a cloud agnostic IoT platform, enabling municipal officials and civil protection teams to rapidly and accurately identify areas with high concentrations of rainwater. By analysing telemetry data from the sensors, corrective measures can be implemented on time.
The primary goal of Fuelics’ solution is to promptly alert the relevant authorities and technical teams before flooding occurs due to overloaded underground rainwater drainage networks. This proactive approach allows for the implementation of necessary preventive measures, helping to protect the wellbeing of residents and visitors of Piraeus, let alone their properties.
The Swarmchestrate “flood prevention” demonstrator shall utilize the exponential edge computing monitoring devices by Fuelics which shall be deployed in Piraeus municipality to address the preventive monitoring of the rainwater network against flooding. Piraeus municipality has a vast network of drainage pipes running beneath a densely populated area. In 425 separate positions, under manhole lids weighing around 80 kg, sensors shall be installed in order to accurately measure the water flow levels from the lid towards the bottom, providing municipality officials with crucial information about water flow level.
Fuelics monitoring devices installed under manhole lids (© Swarmchestrate consortium 2024-2026)
For the municipality the mandate is two-fold. Initially, to prevent flooding by identifying areas where debris, waste or tree leaves are obstructing the water drainage. These blockages should be promptly cleaned to ensure free drain of water. Secondly, to provide in real-time early warnings in the event of a flooding.
In the event of extreme rainfall, authorities have a few minutes to detect a potential flood and take action. This short time frame is critical for deploying on-site anti-flooding measures. This would require the deployed sensors to measure and transmit data very frequently. However, the deployed devices are battery operated and such a configuration normally depletes the batteries after a few months of operation. The goal of the “flood prevention” Swarmchestrate demonstrator is to design and develop an application which shall monitor and dynamically configure the 425 sensors’ operation by optimizing the measurement and connection interval of each sensor based on external data sources, such as weather forecasting services. This is expected to maximise the battery life without jeopardizing the real-time flood detection alerts. By using the Swarmchestrate cloud-to-edge continuum orchestration capabilities, it is forecasted that the battery life of the deployed sensors shall exceed the 5 year operational timespan, while at the same time provide data during extreme rainfall events with detailed measurements in the order of seconds and real-time notifications to the authorities, should the flooding event occur. An additional benefit of leveraging the Swarmchestrate orchestrator in this use case is that once the application is deployed, it can scale from hundreds to thousands of devices in widely dispersed geographical areas across cities, or even countries.
Scwarmchestrate is a very promising orchestrator ecosystem which can be utilized in Smart City IoT applications and enable the implementation of use cases that are currently unattainable with existing Smart City Platforms. Swarmchestrate “flood prevention” demonstrator serves as a case study for such capabilities, while having a tangible impact on the operational readiness and effectiveness of the Piraeus municipality.
Editors:
Evangelos Angelopoulos, PhD, Fuelics CEO & Head of Business Development
Ioannis Nikolaou, PhDc, Fuelics Head of Cloud & Platforms