Proportional-Integral Control for a Water Supply System Prototype Using the IoT Platform Node-RED

In our days, there is a set of problems associated with water scarcity due to its vital importance for humans, as it is related to most of our domestic activities, hygiene, production chains, etc. This situation worsens if we consider technical problems in distribution as leaks as a result of lack of maintenance and aging of infrastructure. Motivated by the issues with the hydraulic distribution network in the city of Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, a prototype was built in order to emulate its operation and validate proposed control schemes as an alternative to the current manual management. The prototype has been built integrating a series of industrial sensors and actuators to truly provide the features of a real application to ease the implementation in a real scenario, using the IoT platform Node-RED. This paper describes a PI-IoT proposed control system for regulating the level of a tank by means of an analog valve. In the real system, these elements are indeed separated by a distance of 4.5 km, which implies the use of a real time communication channel to effectively regulate the level. The performance of the proposed scheme is validated by real time experiments.