Smart Water Infrastructures Laboratory

The AAU Smart Water Infrastructures Laboratory is a modular testing facility designed to emulate various water infrastructures, including Water Distribution Networks, Waste Water Collection, and District Heating Systems. Its primary objective is to tackle challenges in water cycle management by exploring the potential contributions of control technology toward finding solutions.

The laboratory's modular design allows for the execution of realistic experiments, replicating different network topologies and simulating various scenarios such as water leakage, transport delays, sewer overflow, stochastic disturbances, and cyberattacks. Equipped with local data acquisition systems and a central control unit, these test beds offer a flexible control architecture, accommodating both centralized (SCADA) and decentralized/distributed control strategies. This flexibility enables the validation of new control strategies and the testing of data-driven approaches like reinforcement learning, all while ensuring the safety of real networks and individuals.

Furthermore, the test beds facilitate the assessment of fault detection algorithms, leakage detection techniques, and cyber-robust algorithms within a controlled environment, thus minimizing risks associated with experimentation.

Current addition in progress to the lab is building a flexible communication network, that will enable researchers to simulate cyber-attacks against the water distribution system. This addition will be useful for the researchers to emulate different network topologies with injecting various cyber-attacks for their work. NS-3 network simulator will be used to emulate such a network topologies.