An IoT-based maintenance framework for irrigation and drainage water management system at regional scale

The management of the geographically distributed assets of irrigation and drainage water grids compel a challenging alignment of operations like maintenance plans, resources allocation, and spares inventory management systems. We propose an IoT-based maintenance framework to optimize reliability, management costs, and logistics and increase the resilience and sustainability of the irrigation and water management network. The proposed framework provides an interface between the centralized inventory system and the maintenance and logistics operations carried out throughout the network. Information exchange is supported by bar code and RFID technologies integrated within the IT system of the company. A Maintenance Management Software (MMS) able to store assets’ physical hierarchy data and inventory data is the supporting tool that fuels the framework. The framework is applied to a regional drainage water system in Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), improving visibility on the infrastructural network and enabling tailored and data-driven preventive maintenance plans. The combination of the components’ availability, logistics and maintenance costs, failure trend and impact on the overall network contribute to establishing new methods for assessing the threshold of service level (i.e. reliability) to guarantee for each material.