# Towards Digitalization of Water Supply Systems for Sustainable Smart City Development--Water 4.0
## 4 Digital Technologies in the Water System: Key Drivers of Water 4.0
### Big Data Analytics  
In water supply systems, as water utilities deploy smart meters, sensors, and other IoT hardware, water utilities will inevitably handle an enormous amount of data relevant to its operations. Big data (BD) is a term used to describe collections of massive datasets with a large amount of diversity that are challenging to analyze using traditional tools and methodologies [60; 61; 62]. These data are different from the traditional large dataset owing to some features regarded as the 4 Vs of BD, which are volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. The volume indicates the amount of the enormous data generated. Datasets in the range of exabytes have been regarded as BD [63]. Of course, this is not constant and solely \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**LoRa Water Meter Class**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**LoRa Remote Water Meter**} & **LoRa Electronic Remote** & **Wireless Ultrasonic LoRa** \\  & & **Valve Control** & **Water Meter** \\ \hline Size & DN15-DN20 & DN15-DN25 & DN15-DN40 \\ \hline Materials & Iron & Brass & Brass pipe \\ \hline Type & Liquid sealed & Dry-dial & Dry-dial \\ \hline Standard & ISO4064 class B & ISO4064 class B & ISO4064 class B \\ \hline Temperature Class & T30 & T30 & T50 \\ \hline Max. Pressure & 1.0 MPa & 1.0 MPa & 1.6 MPa \\ \hline Battery Life & 6 years & 6 years & 6 years \\ \hline Meter Reading Frequency & 1 day/time & 1 day/time & 1 day/time \\ \hline Communication Method & Lora & Lora & Lora \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: LoRa AMR water meters’ specifications. Figure 7: Samples of AMR water meters with LoRa communication technology (**a**) LoRa remote water meter; (**b**) electronic remote valve control water meter; (**c**) wireless ultrasonic LoRa water meter [59]. depends on the time, data types, and application type [64]. The velocity features of the BD concern the speed at which the data are generated and the rate of analysis. The BD whose volume increases rapidly over time, could be generated in real-time/near real-time, batches, streams or bits. The variety refers to the nature of the data. This could be structured, semi-structured or unstructured. Structured data are those that are well-organized and can be easily stored in relational databases, and categorized and referenced in tabular form, which makes them easily readable by machines [65]. Data obtained from WDN are categorized under unstructured data. Unlike structured data, text, video, and other multimedia content are unstructured because they are random and lack structural organization, which makes them difficult to analyse. The last feature of BD is veracity, which concerns security and indicates untrusted and uncleansed. IoT intelligent sensors generate data related to pressure and flow profiles along each pipe of the complex piping networks. These data require an intelligent analytical solution to be used efficiently for particular applications. For instance, the data from smart acoustic sensors, vibration sensors and accelerometers can be interpreted for leakage analysis applications. In some cases, the data from pressure sensors installed at several points along the piping networks could be used for leak interpretation and generation of leak alarms. Hence, proper interpretation requires a good analysis of such data. The application of advanced analytical techniques to leverage large volumes of heterogeneous data to obtain useful information is generally referred to as Big Data analytics [65]. One area of application where big data analytics may be useful is in the support of sustainable groundwater management and water treatment facilities [66; 67]. As previously mentioned, IoT systems generate a huge amount of data from the connected smart devices and sensors, and the applications which have to be managed efficiently [68]. The large data are stored in the meter data management platform. This platform is desired to manage large data from the installed millions of devices involved in the connection.