Smart systems keep water and power flowing in Cyprus

The University of Cyprus, supported by Imperial, is developing innovative systems for monitoring and managing electricity and water networks.

Water and energy networks are known as critical infrastructure because they’re vital to communities and economic activity. This means that they must be operated efficiently and remain resilient to external challenges at all times.

Using digital technologies to make critical infrastructure smarter, greener, more efficient, reliable and secure, is the mission of the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus, which Imperial has been collaborating with through the Horizon 2020 Teaming programme. This pairs universities with highly innovative peer institutions that can share best-practice to help them boost their innovation capabilities.

Cyprus is a particularly good place to consider critical infrastructure. The country’s electricity network is a rare example of an islanded system, with no connections to other power grids. “This means we need to handle any disturbance to the system on our own, without any help from outside,” says Dr Markos Asprou, Research Lecturer at the KIOS CoE.

This situation is also relevant to the clean energy transition. “The increasing use of renewable sources creates a lot of uncertainty in the operation of energy systems, so there is an additional need to have new operational tools,” Dr Asprou adds.

As for water, the island is all too familiar with the kind of scarcity that many countries now face. As the country experiences prolonged periods of drought, a significant percentage of drinking water is produced by desalinating seawater, which has implications for energy consumption.

“We spend a lot of money and electricity, which produces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, to have our drinking water, so we are very conscious of water as a society,” says Dr Demetrios Eliades, an Assistant Research Professor at the Center who specialises in smart water systems.

Smart water systems

To develop smart water systems requires data. But the researchers found that the information available from water operators in Cyprus was highly fragmented, and stored in varying systems and formats.

“Working with the Limassol District Local Government Organisation, a partner of KIOS Innovation Hub, we identified around 100 different processes involving 40 databases, and they were not connected,” Dr Eliades recalls. “To solve this research problem we first had to identify bottlenecks that existed in the organisation’s operation. Luckily for us, the organisation was very supportive.”

Once they had unpicked a spaghetti diagram of processes, the researchers fed data from the water network into a custom-designed geographical information system, the Oceanos GIS. In this way, the map of the Limassol’s water system—thousands of kilometres of pipes beneath the city—came alive with data from water pressure and water quality sensors, and information about consumer reports and repairs.

This GIS data can then be passed on to models that help simulate the behaviour of the water system. Computation tools then help the people running the network to make operational decisions.

This process also helped Limassol to improve its sensor network. “It’s not practicable to put pressure and water quality sensors everywhere. To find the best locations for them, you need to have a good understanding of how the water flows,” Dr Eliades says.

As more data became available, the ambition for the system began to grow. “The Water Board shifted from wanting just a digital solution to wanting a smart water solution, which would help them make better decisions, faster, and more economically.”

Oceanos Digital Twin

The result of all this work is the Oceanos Digital Twin, a software suite that can create a virtual replica, or digital twin, of any water network. “The digital twin is an ecosystem of tools that allows the operator to ask questions and experiment with the system,” says Dr Eliades. “We can use the digital twin to forecast impacts and investigate different scenarios that may affect the network.”

The overall Oceanos GIS system is now being used for day-to-day management of more than 1300km of pipe networks in Limassol. Parts of the Oceanos Digital Twin are being commercialised through a university spinout company, PHOEBE Innovations, led by an Imperial alumnus. 

Oceanos has also helped solve Dr Eliades’ research challenge, marshalling enough data to build a benchmark – meaning a highly accurate model that other models can be compared against – for leak detection. 

“A lot of researchers working on water networks and leak detection are now using this benchmark as a common reference to demonstrate their algorithms,” he says. “This means we can now compare different solutions in an objective way.” 

Meanwhile, the community working on these issues has expanded from water specialists to include experts in control systems, machine learning, and computer science. “We couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t done the work with Oceanos,” Dr Eliades says. 

This transfer of expertise with Imperial has helped us become the Center of Excellence that we are today. Dr Demetrios Eliades KIOS CoE

At Imperial, Professor Thomas Parisini in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering supported work on the conceptualisation of the digital twin and Professor Chis Hankin in the Department of Computing helped with cybersecurity aspects of the KIOS water security testbed, which was used for testing Oceanos.

Dr Eliades’ team also includes alumni from Imperial, as well as alumni from a Master’s programme in intelligent critical infrastructure systems that was jointly developed by the University of Cyprus and Imperial during the Horizon Europe Teaming project.

“It was very useful for us to have this transfer of expertise with Imperial, which has helped us become the Center of Excellence that we are today,” Dr Eliades concludes. 

Visualising the grid

For electricity grids, the KIOS Centre of Excellence has developed a system that provides real-time insights into grid operation using data provided by an advanced measurement equipment called phasor measurement units (PMUs). The PMU records the voltage and current magnitude and phase angle, and frequency at selected points on the grid. 

PMUs are expensive and cannot be installed in every power substation . “You need to find the optimal locations to install the PMUs in order to have a fully observable system, with all the substations included,” Dr Asprou explains. 

You also have to analyse the data produced by the PMUs very rapidly in order to achieve the real-time monitoring that grid operators require. “In the end we were able to achieve a fully observable power system in Cyprus by installing 18 PMUs, reporting to the control centre,” says Dr Asprou. 

This was done in collaboration with the Electricity Authority of Cyprus and the Transmission System Operator of Cyprus. “By processing these measurements through an advanced software tool developed at KIOS CoE, we are able to visualise the operating condition of all the 60 substations on the island.” 

Software shows operators time-series data for voltage, current, active power, reactive power and frequency, helping them identify patterns and anomalies in the grid. Meanwhile, the PMU data can be archived for detailed analysis during disturbances or equipment failures, supporting long-term studies that can enhance grid resilience.

“This is the first version of what we envision having in the tool,” Dr Asprou says. “It is scalable, so we can have more applications for the monitoring and control of power systems.” The next addition will be the real-time estimation of the power system’s inertia, again based on PMU data. “And we are exploring several other capabilities of this technology, and how we can use them for our research and in applications that will be useful for network operators.”

Future commercialisation of the tool is likely to be through partnerships with large companies or licensing, since the market is limited to the one or two transmission system operators in any one country. “The Cyprus power system is now one of the very few in Europe that is fully observable thanks to this approach,” Dr Asprou concludes. “We might consider this a pilot in comparison to the UK transmission grid, for example.”

Main picture courtesy Electricity Authority of Cyprus