A smarter water app development ecosystem

In previous blog posts I have detailed how enterprise apps can be developed today using the IBM Smarter Water Platform. From this a whole enterprise based app development ecosystem can be built up to help address real worlds problems for the water industry such as water conservation and non revenue water (NRW). These apps follow a pattern of; leveraging information from various sources such as the citizen as a sensor and the Internet of Things (IoT) of smart water sensors and meters, analyzing the information with advance analytics, and visualizing the information and analysis in a contextual and situational aware environment. This pattern can yield powerful insights into the water network. In this blog i want to examine this ecosystem more with a story about how multiple players can collaborate around this smarter water ecosystem.

Below is the diagram outlining the development of a smarter water app development ecosystem. The App Store in the diagram below can be realized by our IBM Cloud try and buy offering. We will now look at a non revenue water story that could be realized by this ecosystem.

A Non Revenue Water story (A Smarter Cities ecosystem)

1. A Water Balance App is  developed on the Platform by a App Developer in collaboration with a Domain Expert (an example of a water domain expert would be a water engineering consultancy company). The Water Balance App could then be published to a Smarter Cities App Store (such as IBM Water Usage Analysis app at the IBM’s try and buy site). A domain expert can then consult with the Water Balance App and use it to help find leaking zones in a water system
2. A Domain Expert can then consult with a Pressure Management App (from the Smarter Cities App Store) to help reduce the pressure in the water network and therefore reduce the amount of leaks. The domain expert can extend the app with their domain knowledge (KPI, regulatory reports, SOPs). The Domain Expert can use the Water Balance App to quantify how effective the Pressure Management App has been in terms of leaks reduction in the water network. 
3. An Asset Vendor (an example would be a sonic sensor manufacturer ) can then work with an App Developer to create a Sonic Leak Detection App for their sonic sensors. This app would again be published in the Smarter Cities App Store. A Domain Expert would then consult with the Sonic Leak Detection App to detect a leak down to a particular pipe. The Domain Expert can again use the Water Balance App to quantify how effective the Sonic Leak Detection App has been in terms of leak reduction in the water network.

Here the roles are defined more clearly

• Platform Provider - IBM would be the smarter water platform provider 
• App developer - An app developer would use the platform services and programming model (SDK) to develop apps on the platform, these apps could then be deployed to the Smarter Cities App Store. 
• Domain expert - Domain experts will use the platform as well at the apps from the Smarter Cities App store in their consultancy to give them a competitive advantage. They will typically augment these app with domain specific content (e.g KPI, reports, SoPs).
• Asset Vendor/Content Expert - Asset Vendors provide hardware solutions such as sensor and meter vendors. As cloud hosted solutions become more common, our platform and SDK will become an attractive solution of developing apps to access their hardware that are connected. 

This ecosystem will enable multiple parties to collaborate together to allow them consume and use water resources smarter. The  IBM Smarter Water Platform therefore allows us to build advance analytics based apps with data consumed from the enterprise, the Internet of Things, and the citizen as a sensor thereby opening up a new ecosystems for collaborative smarter planet app development: an enterprise app store. This combined with the latest announcement of a joint collaboration between IBM and Apple makes this a very exciting time.

http://lnkd.in/d_-6WZF

View Eoin Lane's profile

Water and the internet of things

Over the past year on this blog I have been talking about a number of concepts around how we can become smarter about how the world uses water. I thought it would be good for this posting to take a breath and put it all together to give new and existing readers an overview of where the IBM Intelligent Water Platform (IOW) is now and its technical capabilities.

At the heart of IBM Intelligent Water Platform (IOW) is the water information hub (WIH) which provides a system view of the internet of things as related to a water or grid utilities network. This network is built up from elemental data sources such as sensors, meters, enterprise asset management systems, CRM systems, ERP systems and GIS systems. This systems view allows the user to view the water network as a whole, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The water information hub is modeled using a flexible semantic technology that allows the modeling of real world water networks and can manage change dynamically. 

Smarter water enterprise applications can then be build on-top of the water information hub using a software development kit (SDK). The SDK provides a number of core services for the application developer:

• A interface into the water information hub (WIH), 
• A interface into the advanced analytics engines of the platform, 
• A rendering service that allow the application developer to display result to the end user

Using these core interfaces, the platforms eventing model, and an integration with social media services an application developer can develop advanced analytical water application such as pressure management and pump energy optimization and deploy these applications into the IOW platform.

The enterprise application development pattern separates function from content using the concept of a content pack. in a model, view controller pattern. This allows an application developer and business partner to collaborate together to solve a diverse range of global water problems. In the Smarter Water SDK, the application’s content comes in the form of a content pack. We can think of a content pack as a container that holds lots of different types of content, content that can be both consumed and produced by the application, such as KPI, SOPs, and custom reports.

An organizing principle is then used to categorize and classify the applications. This classification is by vertical (e.g. Water sourcing and distribution, waste water, etc), by role (executive, planner, operator) and by business responsibility. This classification allows for multiple application to be installed and configured, as part of the application development lifecycle, into the IOW platform.

All of the services of the IOW SDK interfaces are built and offered as cloud services to allow for remote development and deployment of enterprise applications. All of the enterprise analytical applications can in turn expose and be offered as business services. These applications can then collaborate and cooperate together using their business services to help solve real world water problems such as a leaking pipe.