European Water utilities environment is embedded in a context dealing with global issues such as water scarcity and technical-economic issues such as infrastructure aging. Management of drinking water supply is facing key challenges partly related to traditional water meter, such as managing capital and operational costs; water loss (also known as non-revenue water) due to leaks and other system failures; and water scarcity/conservation.
The core of the solution lies in the renewed access and use of accurate data that Smart Water Metering can provide to decrease operating costs, identify performance issues, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments.

SMART.MET strongly paves the way to a more efficient management providing for example automatic reading of the household meters and billing, real time assessment of water balance for leak detection, identification of abnormal behaviors and awareness-raising, ability to identify user-meters defaults.

However, the lack of common European standards and lack of “open technological platforms” combined to the high transaction cost on the demand side create a lock-in situation in the market and determine a situation of long-term dependency of water operators on technology providers. This determines high average operating costs for water operators and users, as well as collective inefficiency related to the multiplication of different proprietary solutions on the offer side.

The objective of the proposal is thus to drive the development of new technologies to manage smart metering data collection and management, driven by a group of 7 water utilities through a joint Pre Commercial Procurement (PCP).
They are supported by 6 expert organizations for assessing the technologies, implement the new procurement procedures and disseminate the outcomes of the project to other utilities and solutions suppliers.
The duration of the project is 48 months.