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Description
Romania’s investment needs to comply with the EU''s Drinking Water Directive (DWD) and the Urban Wastewater Directive (UWWD) by 2030 are estimated to be 21.5 billion EUR. The digitalisation of the water sector can make the water utilities and services much more efficient than today in the context of limited resources. The role of universities to strengthen the quality of graduate studies, using increased digitalisation and motivations to promote uptake of innovations are important, as the graduates today will be the decision-makers, administrators, managers and scientists tomorrow. Thus, the University of Galati (UGAL) and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) are implementing this project jointly.
The objective of the DIGIWATRO project is to increase the effectiveness in the water sector by enhancing the use of digital tools in utilities facilitated by the enhanced digital competence in graduate education. This will be achieved through two sub-objectives (1) Increase the process surveillance and process control in water supply and wastewater management with a high cost-benefit ratio and (2) Reducing the digital skills mismatch in the water industry.
Summary of project results
Romania’s investment needs to comply with the EU''s Drinking Water Directive (DWD) and the Urban Wastewater Directive (UWWD) by 2030 are estimated to be 21.5 billion EUR. The digitalisation of the water sector can make the water utilities and services much more efficient than today in the context of limited resources. The role of universities to strengthen the quality of graduate studies, using increased digitalisation and motivations to promote uptake of innovations are important, as the graduates today will be the decision-makers, administrators, managers and scientists tomorrow.
To achieve the above goals and also to make the efforts sustainable, the University of Galati (UGAL) and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) are implementing this project jointly to provide necessary training to educators in the field. Although all teachers have started using digital tools in education as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, a minimum of training was provided. Therefore, the DIGIWATRO project focuses on the professional development of teachers both in the use of digital tools in education and the digitalisation of the water sector.
The objective of the DIGIWATRO project is to increase the effectiveness in the water sector by enhancing the use of digital tools in utilities facilitated by the enhanced digital competence in graduate education. This will be achieved through two sub-objectives (1) Increase the process surveillance and process control in water supply and wastewater management with a high cost-benefit ratio and (2) Reducing the digital skills mismatch in the water industry. The target groups are graduate students and university teachers, water utility managers, industrial managers, consultants and researchers, the general public including Roma population.
In the DIGIWATRO project, four intellectual outputs were developed by UGAL and NMBU together to enhance digital surveillance, automation and cybersecurity in water utilities, to promote life-long learning in the water sector using hybrid education, to boost the digital skills of teachers and learners to promote digital Innovations in the water sector with hybrid learning, and to develop digital tools to strengthen involvement in water issues by the general public especially the Roma population.
a) The four intellectual outputs (IO) developed are:
IO1 - offers effective studies regarding the use of digital tools in the water sector. This IO was validated taking into account the 3 papers presented at ETFA 2023 and indexed in IEEE Xplore and SCOPUS and 1 paper presented at WATEFCON2022;
IO2 - offers a new education program that is available to all the practitioners from the industry sector, including the availability of all the courses and practical applications. The importance of this IO is given by the courses and practical applications on modern topics (BIGDATA, software sensors, cybersecurity, predictive maintenance) that are available for the general public, students, teachers and practitioners;
IO3 - offers an extensive presentation of the digital tools that can be used be teachers for enhancing their courses in order to attract more students and also as a requirement from ARACIS in case of hybrid teaching is adopted;
IO4 - offers valuable information regarding the current situation on villages with an important Roma population regarding the access to water and water quality importance knowledge.b) The transnational mobilities for the Romanian staff and students held n Norway and the intensive programme for students held in Romania generated a better understanding of the current state of the art regarding the digitalization in the water industry in Norway and Romania. Thus, new ideas for research and education topics have emerged, including 4 research papers published in 2 top conferences, finalization of a PhD Thesis and a new PhD thesis that approaches the project subject.c) The very good collaboration between partners led to the application with a new project within the Water4All Joint Transnational Call 2022 competition. The proposal passed the first evaluation phase but was ultimately not selected for funding. Also, in a partnership proposal for an International Master under the Erasmus Mundus call in which UGAL was a partner, NMBU was included as an associate partner. Partners are motivated to look for new opportunities based on the extensive understanding of each other’s capabilities, resources and needs provided by the project.
Summary of bilateral results
The NMBU team brought to the DIGIWATRO experience on development of soft sensors as an alternative solution to the hardware sensor for online monitoring of hard-to-measure variables, such as chemical oxygen demand (COD) and total phosphorus (TP). This included a unique modelling approach which is able to identify the nonlinearity of influent and explain the correlation of inputs-outputs. The NMBU team has experience with nonlinear modelling tool multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS). Unlike other machine learning techniques which are "black box" models, MARS provides interpretable models which explained the nonlinearity and correlation of inputs-outputs. The joint research results obtained were included in IO1 and were disseminated inside the partnership in order to attract new students at Master and PhD level. This resulted in a new UGAL PhD student with a thesis entitled “Software sensors using Artificial Intelligence Techniques” that will be carried out with the help from NMBU. Also, an workshop entitled “Workshop on Digitalization of the Water Industry” was jointly organized in the IEEE ETFA 2023 conference (https://2023.ieee-etfa.org/solicited-workshops/workshop_on_digitalization_of_the_water_industry/). This attracted a wide audience at this top level conference (around 280 participants from academia and industry). Another event was in the International Conference on System theory, Control and Computing (ICSTCC) 2022, conference included in the calendar of IEEE, it was organized an invited session with the thematic: Monitoring and Control of Water Systems. This invited session was organized by Marian Barbu, Harsha Ratnaweera, together with Ramon Vilanova (UAB, Spain) and included a presentation of the DigiwatRO project (https://icstcc.ugal.ro/2022/index.php/invited-sessions#Monitoring_and_Control_of_Water_Systems).