skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
Attention:The NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 7:00 AM ET to 7:30 AM ET on Friday, April 24 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


Title: Water-COLOR: Water-COnservation using a Learning-based Optimized Recommender
Efficient water use, particularly in the realm of irrigation, has emerged as a critical concern in regions suffering from persistent drought, such as California and Florida. With the advent of smart irrigation controllers encouraged by environmental policies, a new paradigm of water management is gaining traction. Among these, the Rachio smart controller has garnered significant attention. However, without direct feedback or actual water usage data, optimizing these irrigation systems for enhanced efficiency remains challenging. This paper introduces Water-COLOR, a novel recommendation system integrated within the Rachio smart controller's framework to address this challenge. The system leverages similar landscape profiles to suggest irrigation schedules that are both water-efficient and user-preferable. By analyzing manual user interactions with the controller, Water-COLOR infers user satisfaction, which, along with estimated water usage, informs the adaptation of irrigation plans. The system eschews the need for additional sensors, thereby reducing infrastructure requirements. Our evaluation demonstrates consistent performance across diverse climatic regions and indicates that the system's recommendations could significantly contribute to water conservation efforts. The results not only showcase the potential of Water-COLOR to enhance the efficiency of existing smart irrigation systems but also open avenues for deploying real-time, data-driven environmental solutions.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1952247 2008993
PAR ID:
10562033
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Corporate Creator(s):
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
ISBN:
979-8-3503-4994-8
Page Range / eLocation ID:
93 to 100
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
water efficiency, water conservation, recommendation systems
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Osaka, Japan
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract The rise in smart water technologies has introduced new cybersecurity vulnerabilities for water infrastructures. However, the implications of cyber‐physical attacks on the systems like urban drainage systems remain underexplored. This research delves into this gap, introducing a method to quantify flood risks in the face of cyber‐physical threats. We apply this approach to a smart stormwater system—a real‐time controlled network of pond‐conduit configurations, fitted with water level detectors and gate regulators. Our focus is on a specific cyber‐physical threat: false data injection (FDI). In FDI attacks, adversaries introduce deceptive data that mimics legitimate system noises, evading detection. Our risk assessment incorporates factors like sensor noises and weather prediction uncertainties. Findings reveal that FDIs can amplify flood risks by feeding the control system false data, leading to erroneous outflow directives. Notably, FDI attacks can reshape flood risk dynamics across different storm intensities, accentuating flood risks during less severe but more frequent storms. This study offers valuable insights for strategizing investments in smart stormwater systems, keeping cyber‐physical threats in perspective. Furthermore, our risk quantification method can be extended to other water system networks, such as irrigation channels and multi‐reservoir systems, aiding in cyber‐defense planning. 
    more » « less
  2. Collaborative infrastructure systems are vital for managing scarce resources, particularly where user behaviors influence system sustainability. This study examines the relationship between design of constructed water infrastructure and strategic behaviors, focusing on flood irrigation systems as an example of collaborative infrastructure. The objectives are to investigate 1) whether shared water infrastructure can be effectively modeled using the stag hunt game framework and 2) how network topology impacts the strategic stability of user cooperation. Flood irrigation relies on collective action, where users balance risks of collaboration failure against benefits of successful cooperation. This situation closely aligns with stag hunt dynamics, in which users choose between a higher-value but riskier collaborative strategy or a lower-value, safer independent option. A key challenge arises when users opt out, increasing the burden on remaining collaborators. We apply a game-theoretic model using risk dominance criteria to analyze stability across four distinct infrastructure topologies: linear, tree, bus, and star. Results identify star and bus topologies as Pareto efficient, where a bus topology offers greater economic efficiency through reduced infrastructure costs and a star topology enhances stability due to equitable distribution of influence and reduced dependencies. An agent-based simulation validates analytical findings by dynamically captures user interactions under uncertainty and showing a strong correlation with game-theoretic results. Consequently, this study confirms the applicability of stag hunt frameworks for analyzing collaborative water infrastructure and provides practical insights into how topology design can influence cooperative resilience. These findings enhance knowledge for sustainable improvement of collaborative infrastructure. 
    more » « less
  3. The amount of greenhouse gas emissions from streetlights is equivalent to 2.6 million cars with as many as 26 million streetlights in the United States. The proposed IoT controller integrates sensors to make these streetlights as hubs for smart environment monitoring with effective energy usage. Conservation of energy is one of the main concerns in the modern era, and energy coming from the sun can be utilized efficiently alongside a smart streetlight management system instead of conventional streetlight management techniques. Additionally, with streetlights being present throughout a city, the opportunity to collect city-wide weather data is proposed. To this end, a solar-powered IoT-based smart street lighting and environmental monitoring system is proposed. The proposed energy-efficient IoT-based system uses a microcontroller to control light-emitting diode (LED) streetlights depending on lighting conditions and vehicle detection, ensuring that the streetlights can be turned on when needed. 
    more » « less
  4. Water resource has become one of the most precious resources in recent decades. Agriculture accounts for about 80\% of the total water usage in US. There is a demanding need for efficient irrigation and water management systems built for sustainable water utilization in smart agriculture. Real time in-situ soil moisture sensing is a vital part for smart agriculture. Traditional electromagnetic (EM) based soil moisture sensing relies on EM based wireless sensor or ground penetrating radar (GPR) system. Based on the receiving signal strength and delay, tomographic techniques are used to derive the dielectric parameters of the soil, which are then into soil moisture distribution using empirical model. However, the EM signal attenuate sharply during underground propagation because of high operating frequency and lossy medium. In order to counter the disadvantage for underground sensing, we propose a Magnetic Induction (MI) based large range soil moisture sensing scheme in inhomogeneous environments. Here, we present the topology of the sensing system and analyze the channel model. The sensing process is based on transformed model, the conductivity and permittivity distribution are derived using SIRT algorithm. Through COMSOL simulation and analytical results, our proposed soil moisture sensing method achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.06 m^3/m^3 in 40 m 2D scale inhomogeneous environment range. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a smart irrigation system using Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which can be used for automating the irrigation process in agricultural fields. It is expected that this system would create a better opportunity for farmers to irrigate their fields efficiently, as well as eliminating the field's under-watering, which could stress the plants. The developed system is organized into three parts: sensing side, cloud side, and user side. We used Microsoft Azure IoT Hub as an underlying infrastructure to coordinate the interaction between the three sides. The sensing side uses a Raspberry Pi 3 device, which is a low-cost, credit-card sized computer device that is used to monitor in near real-time soil moisture, air temperature and relative humidity, and other weather parameters of the field of interest. Sensors readings are logged and transmitted to the cloud side. At the cloud side, the received sensing data is used by the irrigation scheduling model to determine when and for how long the water pump should be turned on based on a user-predefined threshold. The user side is developed as an Android mobile app, which is used to control the operations of the water pump with voice recognition capabilities. Finally, this system was evaluated using various performance metrics, such as latency and scalability. 
    more » « less