IIIT-H Smart City Living Lab Launches First Digital Twin for Water Network

Hyderabad: The Smart City Living Lab has announced the launch of its innovative Digital Twin for water utility network. This project was initiated in collaboration with ZF Technologies, a CSR initiative five months ago, represents a significant advancement in smart city infrastructure management.

Anuradha Vattem, Chief Technology Architect said that the idea of building a Digital Twin has been triggered when an MoU for establishing Centre of Excellence for Water (Water COE)with Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB) last February and one of the problems discussed was the Digital Twin for Water and Sewerage Treatment Plant.

In continuation with that, the team started understanding and thinking on how Digital Twin can be applied and used for Utility networks like water. And ZF has facilitated and fuelled our idea in building the first Digital Twin for a water network in IIITH Smart City Living Lab.

In brief about the product, an area of water network in the Kohli research Block was identified where Different nodes (water quality, water flow, water level and motor control) were deployed. After extensive research into existing software options and exploring all possibilities, the team opted to develop its own software stack, tailored specifically for this project. It has used the standard stack used for smart city solutions (including the oneM2M interoperable layer).

The ZF Team is led by Krishnaswamy Jambunathan, vice president and Head of Tech Centre India at ZF Group and Rakesh Mishra, Head of Finance, has graced the official launch of the Digital Twin at the Campus. Jambunathan appreciated the team’s effort towards developing the platform.

The successful implementation of the Digital Twin technology has garnered immense satisfaction from the ZF Team. The launch event marks the culmination of this collaborative effort and paves the way for wider adoption of this groundbreaking solution.

After the Launch, Mementoes were given to the team who worked on the Digital Twin Project as a token of appreciation.

Dr Deepak Gangadharan says, “The Water Network Twin project with ZF is very timely, given the National initiative of Sangam Digital Twin by DoT. This demonstrates the commitment and expertise of IIIT-H in being one of the major contributors in the Digital Twin space for Smart City solutions”.

Following the launch, the Smart City Living Lab and ZF technologies teams engaged in discussions regarding the various activities to be planned as a part of the future collaboration. ZF team mentioned that they were happy with the progress made on the campus and are very much interested in working on more future collaborations.

Dr Karthik Vaidhyanathan said that the biggest takeaway from this project has been in taking the concept of digital twin from lab to land thereby contributing towards the goal of sustainable smart cities. This experience has enabled our team to move towards the development of a platform that enables city stakeholders in building digital twins for different smart city use cases

Anuradha reiterated that this visit from ZF to the Smart City Living Lab proved fruitful and it marks the beginning of many more engagements with ZF in the coming years.