Water supply systems are essential for a modern society. This article presents an overview of the latest research related to information and communication technology systems for water resource monitoring, control and management. The main objective of our review is to show how emerging technologies offer support for smart administration of water infrastructures. The paper covers research results related to smart cities, smart water monitoring, big data, data analysis and decision support. Our evaluation reveals that there are many possible solutions generated through combinations of advanced methods. Emerging technologies open new possibilities for including new functionalities such as social involvement in water resource management. This review offers support for researchers in the area of water monitoring and management to identify useful models and technologies for designing better solutions.

Water is one of the most important factors that can influence human health. Therefore, constant monitoring of water consumption is essential to maintain a balance of water demand. A recommendation system represents a major challenge, but with huge potential for the water industry, providing consumers the most efficient ways to conserve water based on their data collected from smart water meters. This paper proposes a novel recommendation system design architecture that promotes water conservation behavior among residential consumers from urban areas. We analyzed 480,000 data samples from several households with different profiles to generate personalized recommendations for each household and encourage consumers to adopt measures to raise awareness and reduce water consumption. Moreover, data were collected from three different measurement points in the household (cold_sink, hot_sink, and toilet), with a sampling time of 60 s. The proposed recommendation system implements collaborative filtering combined with a set of rules to generate recommendations based on the consumption patterns of similar households. The results are promising, offering personalized feedback that could help change the consumption behavior of households if the recommendations made are followed.

Water is one of the most important resources in our lives, and because of this, the interest in water management systems is growing constantly. A primary concern regarding urban water distribution is how to build robust solutions to facilitate water monitoring flows with the support of consumer involvement. Crowdsensing solutions contribute to the involvement in social platforms for increased awareness about the importance of water resources based on incentives and rewards. Blockchain is one of the technologies that has become increasingly popular in the last few years. The possibility of using this architecture in such different sectors while integrating emerging concepts, such as crowdsensing, the Internet of Things, serious gaming, and decision support systems, offers a lot of alternatives and approaches for designing modern applications. This paper aims to present how these technologies can be combined in order to migrate the functionalities of a water distribution management system from a centralized architecture to a decentralized one by leveraging blockchain technologies. The proposed application was designed to facilitate incident reporting flows in public water distribution networks. The proposed solution was to migrate the rewarding mechanisms using the Ethereum infrastructure. The novelty of this solution is determined by the introduction of this decentralized approach into the architecture and also by increasing customer interest by offering tradeable rewards and dynamic subscription discounts. This results in a new decentralized architecture that allows for more transparent interactions between the water provider and clients and increases customer engagement to contribute to water reporting flows.