About

Urban drainage infrastructure faces major challenges to keep desired performance levels due to aging systems, worsened by both natural and anthropogenic factors. To address these challenges and enhance the sustainability, safety, and resilience of urban drainage systems (UDSs), innovative management solutions and strategies are a must. Ongoing digital transformation represents an opportunity for water utilities to solve some of the urgent issues they are facing. Digital Twins (virtual replicas) could be a viable decision support tool for water utilities.

DIGIDRAIN project aims at contributing to the creation of such a next-gen Digital Twin (DT) framework for UDSs. The project is based on knowledge transfer between diaspora experts and Serbian researchers and on synergy of Serbia-Diaspora team in joint research toward next-gen DT framework. The project is based collaborative research to develop a concept of advanced digital twins.

The research aims to develop solutions for integrating sensor data deployed throughout the sewer system and a simulation model, which can help water utilities to:

1. Provide energy efficiency and efficient resource allocation through real-time monitoring and modeling of sewer systems,

2. Provide a safe virtual environment for testing the effects of various undesirable scenarios, thus enabling support in planning system maintenance tasks,

3. Develop a virtual environment for testing new blue-green technologies (nature-based solutions) to enhance system resilience.

Innovative solutions will be developed using international open databases and demonstrated on a local sewer system. During the project, industry partners will be actively involved in activities, which will help to extend the impact to other end-users in the industry.