A Scheme for efficient and equitable use of public utilities through supervisory and distributed control

Clean water and electricity are the two major public utilities for any society and it is the responsibility of each consumer to use these resources efficiently and minimize the wastage. This paper presents a distributed control scheme to address these issues for each utility. In this scheme, wireless sensor network is used for on-line monitoring and automated control of water in overhead tanks. In a similar way, using energy meters and intelligent circuit breakers, the power consumption is remotely monitored and power delivery is automated. A cloud based user application is developed through which authorized operators can view the complete data of water flow as well as energy consumption at desired locations on a single graphical user interface (GUI). The distributed control is developed using Internet enabled embedded boards along with sensors and supporting network nodes. IBM’s Watson IoT platform is used for data acquisition, analysis and control.