Efficient Sewer Sensor Deployment

Water Level monitoring sensing data is essential to tracking and predicting combined sewer overflow. The sensors are typically widely installed under manholes across large area. The operational cost is thus a burden for responsible city agency with limited budget.

Fujitsu laboratory developed a new way of deploying monitoring sensors to sewer system that reduces the number of sensors by 80%. It first installed a full set of sensors and collected the data. Then it analysed the correlation between water level activities monitored each manhole. The points that show low correlation with the furthest-down stream manhole were removed. The pruned network of sensors still maintained the tracking and predictive accuracy.

This technology demonstrated a reduction of total power consumption of 70%. It should be employed by any cities with a working sensor network to optimize its network configuration and to reduce cost. It should definitely also be adopted by the cities designing and deploying a new network.