ACWA: An AI-driven Cyber-Physical Testbed for Intelligent Water Systems
This addresses water and agricultural challenges like cyberbiosecurity and sustainability for researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing testbed concepts.
The authors tackled the need for advanced water supply management by developing ACWA, a cyber-physical testbed that integrates AI and cybersecurity, resulting in a system with multiple topologies, sensors, and a simulator for validation, along with publicly available datasets and software.
This manuscript presents a novel state-of-the-art cyber-physical water testbed, namely: The AI and Cyber for Water and Agriculture testbed (ACWA). ACWA is motivated by the need to advance water supply management using AI and Cybersecurity experimentation. The main goal of ACWA is to address pressing challenges in the water and agricultural domains by utilising cutting-edge AI and data-driven technologies. These challenges include Cyberbiosecurity, resources management, access to water, sustainability, and data-driven decision-making, among others. To address such issues, ACWA consists of multiple topologies, sensors, computational nodes, pumps, tanks, smart water devices, as well as databases and AI models that control the system. Moreover, we present ACWA simulator, which is a software-based water digital twin. The simulator runs on fluid and constituent transport principles that produce theoretical time series of a water distribution system. This creates a good validation point for comparing the theoretical approach with real-life results via the physical ACWA testbed. ACWA data are available to AI and water domain researchers and are hosted in an online public repository. In this paper, the system is introduced in detail and compared with existing water testbeds; additionally, example use-cases are described along with novel outcomes such as datasets, software, and AI-related scenarios.