Integrated Smart Water System in the Acquedotto Pugliese Control Room

Simona Corrado

Acquedotto Pugliese modernizes Europe's largest water network via a digital ecosystem in an advanced Control Room. AQP is Italy's largest publicly-owned water company, recognized for its strategic national relevance. Serving four million people facing droughts, AQP engineered the Smart Water Management System to shift to a predictive paradigm. The transition began in 2021 with sensor deployments, achieved its milestone in January 2024 with the Control Room, and is in full implementation. Objectives target operational optimization by overcoming data silos, mitigating water scarcity, and reducing the energy footprint. This approach extends the lifecycle of physical assets and optimizes all capital expenditures. The 4.8 million budget targets physical perception layers, the digital core, and human capital training. The strategy centers on data fusion and centralized governance, converting raw data into actionable intelligence. The smart grid implementation is methodically structured upon three foundational pillars. First, continuous acoustic monitoring via 20,589 noise loggers covering 4,500 kilometers of pipelines identifies leaks daily. Second, it focuses on integrating high-frequency telemetry from 11,000 field sensors and a large-scale rollout of 380,000 ultrasonic smart meters. Third, the predictive Hydraulic Digital Twin uses over one hundred interconnected models to dynamically simulate network behavior and dispatch maintenance. Ultimately, results set a definitive international benchmark. Operationally, the transition halved maintenance times and yielded a forty percent increase in leak detection efficiency. The system prevents 250 liters per second of water loss, recovering eight million cubic meters annually. Environmentally, preventing loss lowers carbon intensity and vehicle emissions, preserving water for a sustainable future. This blueprint effectively shifts corporate culture to data-driven operations, guaranteeing true long-term structural scalability.

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Simona Corrado IT

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