Andalusia Smart Region uses Context Broker for intelligent irrigation system
Eight parks around Osana were installed with IoT devices for intelligent irrigation, cutting water consumption by up to 45%.
Osuna is a municipality in southern Spain, in the province of Seville, and has about 17,000 inhabitants. It is located 87.4 kilometres from the capital. Its climate is characterised by cold, frosty winters and very hot summers, with temperatures reaching as high as 40 °C. The Parks and Gardens Service of Osuna City Council is responsible for the conservation and maintenance of green areas, whether they are landscaped areas or urban parks in the city. Water is the city’s most precious resource and its intelligent management is one of the main challenges faced every day. Their objective, therefore, is to improve the efficiency of municipal water services by reducing and adapting the use of water to weather conditions and the needs of each garden.
To establish smart irrigation, eight parks were selected for a pilot under the Andalusia Smart Region project: San Arcadio, El Maestrito, Rector Miguel Florencio Lora, Plaza de las Flores, Parque de las Autonomías, 8 March, Vice Rector Juan José Iglesias and Mohedana.
The objective of the ‘Andalusia Smart Region’ project is to deploy smart city and smart agro pilots in different provinces of Andalusia, so that public administrations can test and analyse different smart solutions and their suitability for the management of cities. The project was carried out under ‘FIWARE Zone’, a Spanish joint initiative between Telefónica and the Regional Government of Andalusia to promote the development of smart, IoT-based solutions using the NGSI-LD API specification. The European Commission partly funded the creation of FIWARE and promotes their work with the Context Broker Building Block, a comprehensive Commission solution offered by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme with documentation and support services to help European organisations adopt FIWARE based technologies.
The smart irrigation management system consisted of various technologies to manage the maintenance of the eight gardens and parks in a centralised manner. The solution is explained below – tech talk alert!
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices needed to measure conditions such as rain, wind, humidity and temperature are called IoT sensors (1). The IoT devices that are able to take action, such as solenoid valves capable of turning water on and off, are called actuators (2).
Several remote units or secondary nodes (3) were installed on light posts to help forward measures from sensors to the signal hub or main node (4), which further transmits them to the irrigation server (5). In the other direction, remote units are also able to forward commands from technical operators to actuators as they come through the irrigation server via the main node.
