The fourth industrial revolution has transformed the industry, with information technology playing a crucial role in this shift. The increasing digitization of industrial systems demands efficient sensing and control methods, giving rise to soft sensors that have the potential to replace traditional physical sensors in order to reduce costs and enhance efficiency. This study explores the implementation of an artificial neural network (ANN) based soft sensor model in a water supply system to predict flow rates within the system. The soft sensor is centered on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) artificial neural network model using Monte Carlo dropout to reduce uncertainty and improve estimation performance. Based on the results of this work, it is concluded that the proposed soft sensor (with Monte Carlo dropout) can predict flow rates more precisely, contributing to the reduction in water losses, as well as cost savings. This approach offers a valuable solution for minimizing water losses and ensuring the efficient use of this vital resource. Regarding the use of soft sensors based on LSTM neural networks with a careful choice of Monte Carlo dropout parameters, when compared to the multilayer perceptron model, the LSTM model with Monte Carlo dropout showed better mean absolute error, root mean square error, and coefficient of determination: 0.2450, 0.3121, and 0.996437 versus 0.2556, 0.3522, and 0.9954. Furthermore, this choice of Monte Carlo dropout parameters allowed us to achieve an LSTM network model capable of reducing uncertainty to 1.8290, keeping the error metrics also at low levels.

As hydroenergetic losses are inherent to water supply systems, they are a frequent issue which water utilities deal with every day. The control of network pressure is essential to reducing these losses, providing a quality supply to consumers, saving electricity and preserving piping from excess pressure. However, to obtain these benefits, it is necessary to overcome some difficulties such as sensing the pressure of geographically distant consumer units and developing a control logic that is capable of making use of the data from these sensors and, at the same time, a good solution in terms of cost benefit. Therefore, this work has the purpose of developing a pressure monitoring and control system for water supply networks, using the ESP8266 microcontroller to collect data from pressure sensors for the integrated ScadaLTS supervisory system via the REST API. The modeling of the plant was developed using artificial neural networks together with fuzzy pressure control, both designed using the Python language. The proposed method was tested by considering a pumping station and two reference units located in the city of João Pessoa, Brazil, in which there was an excess of pressure in the supply network and low performance from the old controls, during the night period from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. The field results estimated 2.9% energy saving in relation to the previous form of control and a guarantee that the pressure in the network was at a healthy level.