On June 17, the DEEC TALK entitled “21st-Century Cities Built on 19th-Century Infrastructure: A Paradigm in Rupture” took place. The session featured Miguel Lima, an alumnus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and currently CEO of Arquiled. His work is focused on the modernization and optimization of water supply and public lighting systems.

The talk began with a brief introduction of the speaker by Jorge Sousa, Associate Professor with Habilitation at DEEC and Senior Researcher at INESC-ID.

Miguel Lima began by highlighting that, according to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. It is also estimated that, by 2030, there will be approximately 43 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants, leading to a significant increase in resource demand and placing additional pressure on urban infrastructure. As examples of the complex systems operating in cities, the speaker referred to energy, gas and water supply infrastructures, telecommunications networks, sewage systems, roads, and public lighting systems. With urban growth, five key aspects must be taken into account: the current capacity of these systems, planning for their future use, their resilience and fault tolerance, their efficiency in terms of resource consumption and associated costs, and their security, including protection against potential cyberattacks.

According to the speaker, current challenges in this field include the lack of data and the difficulty of accessing different systems, since a large portion of infrastructure is buried underground. Additional challenges arise from the aging of infrastructure and from modifications carried out at different times and locations that are often not reflected in the system documentation.

Considering these challenges, Miguel Lima focused on three essential systems: water supply, sanitation, and public lighting. In 2023, approximately 21% of the water supplied in Portugal was lost, corresponding to around 52 GWh of energy losses and 470 thousand tonnes of CO₂ emissions. In addition, sanitation systems face issues such as overflows during periods of heavy rainfall, flooding, and high energy consumption at pumping stations due to sediment accumulation and pipeline deterioration. Regarding public lighting, the use of intelligent light intensity regulation systems (smart dimming) can further reduce energy consumption by approximately 30%.*

To improve system efficiency, the researcher presented a brief reflection on two possible approaches: investment in new infrastructure—which, despite being expensive, is only a short-term solution, as problems tend to reappear as infrastructure ages, while knowledge gaps about system operation remain—and the collection and analysis of data, which is less costly and enables real-time operational control as well as the planning and forecasting of events and correlations across different parts of the system. This approach includes the deployment of low-power sensors throughout the network.

However, deploying such sensors requires the use of low-energy batteries, low data transmission rates, and limited CPU and memory resources. Due to these constraints, it is also necessary to implement self-healing code, redundancy mechanisms for critical data and software storage, and automatic updates to increase system resilience. In addition, the sensors must be protected against water, dust, temperature variations, impacts, and vibrations. These sensors can be used, for example, in water supply networks to detect leaks or fraud in real time and, consequently, reduce energy losses throughout the process.

Beyond sensor deployment, Miguel Lima emphasized the broader benefits of developing smart systems, particularly for public lighting. Existing infrastructure can be enhanced through the integration of 5G or Wi-Fi antennas, electric vehicle charging stations, air quality monitoring devices, and video surveillance systems, among other applications. He also noted that such systems could be used to monitor radio-frequency emissions and potentially detect road accidents through the integration of microphones.

In conclusion, Miguel Lima highlighted that although research and development of these sensors is still at an early stage, ongoing technological advances and increasing digitalization have already contributed to reducing implementation costs.

Currently, Bright Science, Arquiled’s research and development team, is available to support master’s theses, internships, and other academic projects.

The session concluded with a Q&A segment in which members of the audience had the opportunity to ask questions.

*Sources: ERSAR Annual Report, ERSE, Arquiled, ADENE Working Group on Energy Efficiency in Water Services.