Author(s): Robert Ljubicic; Damjan Ivetic; Milos Milasinovic
Linked Author(s): Robert Ljubicic
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: The integration of Digital Twins into drainage management systems offers unprecedented opportunities for real-time monitoring, predictive modeling, and adaptive control of urban water infrastructure. One of the main challenges, especially in countries with underdeveloped infrastructure monitoring, lies in acquiring accurate (near) real-time data with high temporal resolution to capture flow dynamics across diverse hydraulic conditions. Videographic (camera-based) measurement techniques offer an opportunity to fill such gaps, as they provide non-intrusive, scalable, and visually verifiable data to be used in conjunction with traditional, but often very costly, monitoring approaches. While videographic measurement techniques have been successfully deployed in riverine systems in the past, their introduction to closed-conduit municipal systems has been lagging. The DIGIDRAIN project aims to create a framework for setting up Digital Twins for urban sewage systems. This effort is also to include the application of custom-made low-cost camera-based solutions in key network locations, and investigate the opportunities and challenges which they provide – (1) the choice of best-fitting image-processing methods depending on flow and ambient conditions, (2) cost effectiveness, (3) hardware reliability, and (4) the usefulness and uncertainty of such data for the creation, calibration, and exploitation of the resulting Digital Twin. Preliminary results from a real-world test of a low-cost camera-based setup are presented. The tests are performed in harsh low-light winter conditions with a device installed for autonomous operation inside a maintenance hole. While the acquired data is analysed and provides good agreement with reference measurements, several key challenges – persistent power supply, low-light visibility, visibility issues due to aerosol dispersion, etc. – have been identified with adequate mitigation strategies considered for future work.
Year: 2026