ESA title

OWASIS-UK

  • ACTIVITYFeasibility Study
  • STATUSCompleted
  • THEMATIC AREAInfrastructure & Smart Cities, Environment, Wildlife and Natural Resources, Water

Objectives of the service

The main objective of this project is to study and investigate the feasibility of new integrated services based on space-based and terrestrial innovative technologies to improve the monitoring of water availability, quality and distribution. The accomplishment of this objective will be possible by providing the following intermediate objectives:

  • Define a sustainable and high added-value service line; targeted water actors based on innovative technologies including space assets augmented by in situ sensors and state of the art information and communication technologies solutions.
  • Exploring the potential to combine innovative tools such as optical and Radar data from EOS together with innovative in situ and aerial sensors, hydrological models and crowd sourcing / monitoring.
  • Provide innovative monitoring and decision support system, for better monitor, forecast and control the quality and availability of water.

Users and their needs

OWASIS-UK focuses on the UK market and it targets all types of user groups such as industrial users, public water authorities or regulatory organisms. The water industry actors who get involved in the project activities which they could be potential end-users after the project has been completed are:

  • Yorkshire Water
  • Southwest Water
  • Thames Water

Each of these users has manifested an interest for a particular service line that is within the variety of services that were proposed initially by OWASIS UK.

Country of the targeted users: United kingdom

Service/ system concept

OWASIS-UK system integrates data and information using earth observation, location based services, in-situ monitoring networks, telemetry and supervisory and data acquisition systems (SCADA). Available data and information sources are merged in models, allowing assimilation of data and gaining a better insight into essential processes and the current state of the water systems. ICT solutions enables sharing data and information over organizations such as water companies, authorities, data providers and researchers of the water domain, permitting new integrated solutions by fusing data flows of various sources and allow new integrated applications which were virtually impossible to develop till recently.

This service offers to the users an improved innovative monitoring and decision support system fulfilling their needs and addressing their currents system limitations, packaged in a service that can be integrated in a seamless way into the current practices.

Space Added Value

OWASIS-UK system expected to be cost-effective, sustainable, and exportable to broader user groups such as farming industry, environment board, as well as other countries where water issues can be tackled with the same tools.

One of the key goals of OWASIS-UK is exploring the potential to combine optical and radar data from EOS with meteorological data together with innovative in situ sensors, hydrological modelling and crowd sourcing technologies, and the advanced visualization of the information through situation awareness platforms and decision support tools, to better monitor, forecast and control the quality and availability of water.
 
OWASIS-UK system expected to be cost-effective, sustainable, and exportable to broader user groups such as farming industry, environment board, as well as other countries where water issues can be tackled with the same tools.

Current Status

On June 15th, OWASIS-UK feasibility study was successfully concluded. The proposed integrated platform demonstrated a good compliance with the operational requirements as well as for the service capacities from a provide point of view.
 
In the last phase of the project the three different services agreed for this study were assessed through the Proof of Concept (PoC) individually. After this campaign, one out of three end-users was interested in the possibility of going for a demo phase (Monitoring and Forecast of Soil Moisture Saturation). Regarding the other two end-users, one of them, due to earlier results presented by the consortium, decided to go ahead developing their own technology (Moorland Monitoring service). Finally, despite the promising results presented in the Leakage Detection service, the end-user decided to no participate yet in a demo phase. Therefore, it is expected, due to user’s interest and the encouraging results obtained in the PoC, that both services will be able to conduct a demo phase in a short/mid-term.

Prime Contractor(s)

Status Date

Updated: 02 October 2015