Demand management for utilities industries

Global warming and climate change are putting stress on the fresh water reserves on the entire planet, governments and organizations growing concern about the topic has set in motion a set of practices and strategies to involve citizens, companies and local governments in water conservation and sustainability. Water utility companies have constant pressure to cover the demand of the consumers while complying with fast changing regulations and policies, dealing with extreme water effects like droughts, and infrastructure problems like leakage and failures. This thesis project is focus in providing utility companies with data analytics and visualization to support their decision making processes and water supply planning and forecasting, and at the same time inform and educate end consumers about the importance of water efficient consumption. This is done in the context of the smartH2O project that by collecting household consumption data through smart meters provides with information to the end consumer in an interactive gamified way to raise awareness of the water usage, and to utility managers to monitor the consumption trends and to understand consumer behavior and attitude toward different factor like pricing and other policies. In particular this thesis covers the scientific and technological background required to implement water management systems including concepts like smart metering technologies, big data analytics for user profiling and end-use disaggregation, visualization interfaces and gamification. And then presents in detail execution of the software engineering process following a user centered design and agile methodologies to deliver high quality artifacts and products. Finally, this work discusses some of the overall results obtain so far for the smartH2O project and their implication in the context of water management and conservation, and the future work needed.