A Blockchain Approach for Migrating a Cyber-Physical Water Monitoring Solution to a Decentralized Architecture

Abstract

Water is one of the most important resources in our lives, and because of this, the interest in water management systems is growing constantly. A primary concern regarding urban water distribution is how to build robust solutions to facilitate water monitoring flows with the support of consumer involvement. Crowdsensing solutions contribute to the involvement in social platforms for increased awareness about the importance of water resources based on incentives and rewards. Blockchain is one of the technologies that has become increasingly popular in the last few years. The possibility of using this architecture in such different sectors while integrating emerging concepts, such as crowdsensing, the Internet of Things, serious gaming, and decision support systems, offers a lot of alternatives and approaches for designing modern applications. This paper aims to present how these technologies can be combined in order to migrate the functionalities of a water distribution management system from a centralized architecture to a decentralized one by leveraging blockchain technologies. The proposed application was designed to facilitate incident reporting flows in public water distribution networks. The proposed solution was to migrate the rewarding mechanisms using the Ethereum infrastructure. The novelty of this solution is determined by the introduction of this decentralized approach into the architecture and also by increasing customer interest by offering tradeable rewards and dynamic subscription discounts. This results in a new decentralized architecture that allows for more transparent interactions between the water provider and clients and increases customer engagement to contribute to water reporting flows.