SCC-IRG-Track2: Creating an Extensible Data Exchange and Analytics Sandbox for Smart Water infrastructures

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The importance of water to civilization is unquestionable; over centuries, this critical community lifeline has become complex with multiple subsystems (drinking water(DW), wastewater(WW), and stormwater(SW)) to import, deliver and haul away water. Today, these infrastructures are designed and operated separately by an array of local governments, water districts, and regulatory agencies - all subjected to stress caused by aging, urbanization, failures, extreme events, and demand/supply variabilities. This proposal brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners in computer science, civil engineering, public policy, and social ecology to create a Smart Water data-exchange framework, SWADE, that will serve as a repository and sandbox for collecting, sharing, exploring, analyzing, and curating information about diverse community water systems. SWADE will utilize recent advances in IoT and big data systems to create a holistic understanding of these interacting platforms - the framework integrates static and dynamic data from infrastructures and communities with domain-specific models/simulators and analytics services to create new levels of efficiency and resilience in co-executing systems. Innovative research will address tradeoffs (e.g. cost, accuracy) in data collection, develop semantic approaches for joint data representation and storage, explore data cleaning and refinement mechanisms, promote community engagement to drive policy-based exchange to address data-sharing barriers and design novel analytics to understand resilience and societal impact of water policies. Innovations to existing infrastructures require public acceptance; to achieve this, the team includes practitioners at water agencies in Southern California (e.g. Orange County, Irvine, Los Angeles) and Illinois who will help create and instantiate the SWADE framework; interactions with agencies in Florida and Maryland will help ensure transferability of SWADE.Through SWADE, communities around the nation can learn and share lessons with each other, experiment with sample data/networks to understand design choices as they plan future investment in water systems. This project can help guide policy research on information interchange in other complex community infrastructures (e.g. water-energy-food nexus, transportation networks) where socioeconomic and geopolitical constraints play a role in determining what can be shared and exchanged. Educational outreach will leverage efforts of the Water UCI Center, and campus programs including RET, REU, K-12, and women in STEM programs at UCI and SDSU. Our programs will focus on promoting broader participation by allowing citizens from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to contribute to the essential research mission of ensuring safe and reliable water services for the future.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.