Engineering Challenges and Approaches in Water Quality Monitoring Networks

Observed engineering challenges of developing water quality monitoring networks are presented in this paper and appropriate solution approaches are proposed. Water quality monitoring stations are important tools in the area of environmental water science that are used to collect measurement values. Because of missing plug-and-play support in prevalent field bus systems and lack of semantic information available in sensor devices, the installation and maintenance of monitoring stations requires much more effort than desirable form the perspective of engineers and users. An approach is proposed to reduce this effort by providing a catalog of predefined devices that contains all necessary semantic information. Finally, requirements for advanced field bus systems in the domain of monitoring automation are derived in order to encourage future improvements that minimize engineering effort.