Irrigation network remote monitoring with industrial iot: the success story of the RIVA SINISTRA STURA CONSORTIUM

Digitalizing Water Distribution to Improve Efficiency, Control, and Operational Continuity

The Context

Efficient water resource management is becoming an increasingly important challenge for the agricultural sector. In this scenario, Industrial IoT technologies enable the remote monitoring and control of complex infrastructures, improving operational efficiency, service continuity, and responsiveness to critical events.

The project implemented for the Riva Sinistra Stura Consortium is a concrete example of how digital transformation can optimize irrigation network management.

Founded in Piedmont, Italy, in 1872, the Consortium manages approximately 60 km of irrigation canals serving more than 6,000 hectares of agricultural land, while also supporting industrial water usage and hydroelectric power generation facilities.

The Challenge

To ensure operational continuity, optimize resource consumption, and improve response times, the Consortium decided to digitalize its infrastructure by adopting Orchestra’s Industrial IoT solutions.

The complexity of the irrigation network required a system capable of:

• Monitoring water levels and flow rates in real time.
• Ensuring consistent and reliable water distribution.
• Rapidly managing emergencies and operational anomalies.
• Remotely controlling gates, sluices, and automatic trash rack cleaners.
• Reducing the need for manual field interventions.

The Solution

In 2019, the Consortium began a digital transformation journey inspired by Industry 4.0 principles.

The solution was developed by Orchestra, in collaboration with SHT, a company specialized in the design and implementation of IT infrastructures and responsible for the cloud platform supporting the solution.

Through Orchestra’s Industrial IoT platform, the hydraulic nodes across the irrigation network were connected using Edge devices and a centralized cloud platform. All facilities can now be monitored and managed remotely through a single web-based control room, ensuring greater operational efficiency and faster response times.

The solution enables operators to:

• View real-time field data.
• Remotely control infrastructure and equipment.
• Receive automatic notifications via email and SMS.
• Access complete historical records of operational parameters.

The Results

The implementation of the system enabled the Consortium to:

• Centralize the management and control of the entire irrigation network.
• Reduce time and costs associated with field operations.
• Improve service continuity and infrastructure resilience.
• Enable proactive emergency management through automated alerts.
• Leverage historical data and advanced analytics to support operational decision-making.

By adopting Orchestra’s Industrial IoT technologies, the Consortium transformed a distributed hydraulic network into an intelligent digital infrastructure, achieving greater efficiency, reliability, and water resource management capabilities.

What the Client Says

“The adoption of this fully digital solution has significantly improved the Consortium’s efficiency through technology. The entire local monitoring and control system has been migrated to the cloud, making it possible to remotely manage all functions automatically and instantly. Activities that previously required personnel to travel across the countryside from one hydraulic node to another to operate trash rack cleaners, sluices, and gates can now be performed remotely.

Emergency management has become proactive thanks to SMS and email alerts automatically generated based on predefined events and thresholds. The solution records all system parameters, maintains a complete historical archive, and provides graphical analysis with comparisons between the various monitored parameters. The result is a highly efficient and resilient system.”

Mauro Costa
Technical Manager
Riva Sinistra Stura Consortium