EMASESA (Empresa de Abastecimiento y Saneamiento de Aguas de Sevilla) manages one of the most complex metropolitan water cycle systems in southern Spain, serving 1.4 million people in the city of Seville and eleven municipalities in its metropolitan area, either directly or indirectly.
The scale and complexity of its drinking water and wastewater infrastructure positions EMASESA as a leading public utility in terms of sustainability, the circular economy, and advanced water cycle management. Its 2030 Strategic Plan includes innovative digitalization projects, such as Embalses Digital 5.0 and CREANDO, both funded by NextGenerationEU under the Spanish government’s PERTE program.
Challenges
EMASESA faced water cycle management challenges, stemming from the metropolitan scale of the service (over one million residents), the diversity and extent of its infrastructure (extensive networks, pumping stations, reservoirs, wastewater treatment plants, storm tanks), and a context of recurring water scarcity in the Guadalquivir river basin. In terms of water supply, this resulted in the need to boost system resilience, reduce losses, optimize pressure, and increase energy efficiency. In wastewater treatment, this involved managing highly variable flow rates, minimizing impacts from heavy rainfall events, and increasing the operational robustness of WWTPs and retention systems.
In parallel, the company aimed to align its operations with an increasingly demanding regulatory compliance and environmental performance framework, where discharge regulations and effluent quality requirements (including their transition to stricter standards) called for more stable, traceable, and optimized operations, supported by advanced process and network controls. In addition, sustainability and circular economy objectives, already underway in the utility’s sludge recovery and biogas-based energy production, required greater efficiency, transparency, and continuous performance monitoring.
EMASESA’s digital transformation agenda required the consolidation of over 150,000 signals, 200 hydraulic sectors, over 400,000 meters (75% remotely read), water quality data, real-time external data, numerical modeling, and AI algorithms into a single platform. The goal was to equip the system with predictive capabilities and optimize its operations, including the drinking water service, wastewater infrastructure operations, and overall energy consumption. Against this backdrop, digitalization became a core component of governance, efficiency, and resilience for the entire water cycle.
Solutions
Following the design and initial deployment of a data lake at EMASESA, this project has incorporated various applications from the Xylem Vue platform to optimize advanced water cycle management.
The supply network's digital twin, based on the Real-Time What-If Scenarios application, enables real-time simulation of the system’s past and future hydraulic behavior under diverse operating conditions. This capability supports incident anticipation, scenario analysis, and decision-making in high-stress and contingency situations.
The model is powered by Xylem Vue’s Smart Water Engine (SWE), which unifies and standardizes information from SCADA, IoT sensors, smart meters, GIS, and corporate systems into a common repository, eliminating data silos and enabling more proactive, efficient management that supports the integration of advanced algorithms and AI/ML. Additionally, it uses an Operational Intelligence layer that centralizes monitoring through KPIs, alerts, and dashboards to provide an integrated, real-time overview of the status of the network, its assets, and its processes.
The deployment of the digital twin is complemented by other drinking water solutions, such as Meter Data Analytics (remote meter reading), Leak Detection (advanced leak detection), and Plant Management (advanced DWTP operations), all focused on reducing water and energy consumption.
In the wastewater sector, the project includes the launch of a specific digital twin, utilizing the same structural, modular architecture. This provides EMASESA with a virtual environment that replicates the network’s hydraulic behavior in real time, combining real-time data from sensors with hydrological and hydraulic modeling. The Xylem Vue Real-Time What-If Scenarios application monitors the network’s status, generates early warnings for flooding and overflows, analyzes “what-if” scenarios, and supports operational decision-making through optimized setpoints, reducing discharges and their environmental impact, and improving efficiency and regulatory compliance. In addition, the Xylem Vue Plant Management application enables process optimization at the Copero and Ranilla WWTPs, where a digital twin of each plant has been implemented.
Finally, the project includes the implementation of an early warning system (EWS). This system provides real-time observational and high-resolution predictive weather data from multiple specialized institutional networks, integrating data from radar, rain gauges, and deterministic and probabilistic numerical models. This helps anticipate heavy rainfall events, assess risks, and feed the digital twins with reliable predictions. In addition, it centralizes and validates meteorological information, generates advanced rainfall analyses, and integrates warning and notification systems, strengthening preventive management, service security, and coordinated response with other agencies during extreme events.
The solutions initially implemented have evolved to gradually adapt to EMASESA’s operational requirements. In this process, the utility has contributed its technical criteria and expert knowledge of the water cycle, facilitating the adaptation of the solutions to the operational environment.
This joint effort has enabled the solutions to be adapted and validated under EMASESA’s operational conditions, as a large utility with an advanced level of prior digitalization. It has also been essential for consolidating their use in real-world operational conditions, incorporating practices and standards that improve their reliability and performance. In this regard, it is worth noting that some of the improvements developed during the project have contributed to the technical evolution of the model itself, reflecting a collaboration based on the complementarity between technological capabilities and operational expertise.
Results
The Xylem Vue platform has enabled EMASESA to achieve all its digital transformation objectives. Thanks to the use of Xylem Vue’s advanced AI algorithms, the utility can perform continuous water balancing, objectively measure improvements in network performance, and reduce non-revenue water and fraud. Advanced analytics also enable anticipation of water quality issues, demand trends, and maintenance needs, simultaneously improving the system’s hydraulic, energy, and economic efficiency. These capabilities support reductions in per capita consumption, moving toward the ultimate goal of 90 L/person/day, which is key to adapting to climate change and increasingly frequent drought scenarios.
In addition, this project provides EMASESA with an advanced early warning and scenario simulation system capable of anticipating flooding and overflows during heavy rainfall, as well as optimizing the preventive management of pumping stations and retention basins within its wastewater system. Digital twins, combined with weather forecasts and what-if simulations, strengthen operational and strategic planning, improve internal coordination and liaison with Civil Defense authorities, and promote more transparent and traceable water cycle management. This enhances accountability and reduces environmental risks, thereby protecting water quality and ensuring compliance with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.
The project reflects an effective public-private partnership, in which Xylem’s digital technology and EMASESA’s operational expertise have complemented each other to tailor the solution to the utility’s needs.