Smart Water Quality Monitoring in Vlora: Design of an expert system for real-time monitoring of drinking water and detection of contamination in the aqueduct of the city of Vlora, Albania

In recent years, water pollution has become one of the major problems that countries around the world face. The needs for drinking water in a tourist city like Vlora, Albania have changed in the last twenty years both in terms of the size of the aqueduct and consumption of the population. Therefore, it is important to constantly monitor the quality of the water, to be able to intervene and combat water pollution. The present work proposes a monitoring network based on most important water parameter such as pH, Temperature and Dissolved Oxygen, which will be measured through a network of wireless sensors on the entire water network of the city. This testbed will consist in building a monitoring system that can be later used to monitor other parameters or even in other situations. The system proposed in this approach is a combination of different sensors, whose sole purpose will be the monitoring of the parameter in the water over different time intervals, a database and an expert system. All the information gathered from the sensors related to the Dissolved Oxygen in the water, will be stored in a database. This database will then serve as a focal point for the expert system. The expert system will consist of a knowledge base and an interface engine, which together will serve as a monitoring, diagnostic, signaling, scheduling and planning for specialized events. The knowledge base will function based on data from human experts related to water pollution, for the interference engine to be able to make decisions based on different findings and scenarios in the cases of deviations from the norm parameter. The experimental results gathered during the implementation of the project will serve as a model that in the future can help in other systems that can be used for monitoring the environment in an intelligent and sustainable way.