ESAMUR (Entidad Regional de Saneamiento y Depuración de Aguas Residuales de la Región de Murcia) is the public utility responsible for the management, oversight, and coordination of urban wastewater collection and treatment in the Region of Murcia. The regional system managed by ESAMUR comprises 100 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and 56 pumping stations, distributed across the region’s 45 municipalities. The system treats 112 million cubic meters of wastewater annually and serves approximately 1.5 million residents, providing coverage to over 99% of the urban population. The specific scope of this project, known as REGEN-IA, focuses on 48 WWTPs in 41 municipalities.
This system operates in one of Europe’s most challenging water contexts. Murcia is considered the driest region on the Spanish mainland, characterized by severe structural aridity, low precipitation, and frequent droughts. It is also a major producer of high-value agricultural crops, making wastewater treatment and water reuse infrastructure critical to the region's water security.
In this context, reclaimed wastewater becomes exceptionally valuable as a non-conventional resource. In fact, 98% of the reclaimed water produced by ESAMUR is made available for irrigation, compared to the national average of 9% and the European average of 5%, reinforcing a circular water economy model that is particularly important in a region with high agricultural demands and heavy reliance on alternative resources. This circular economy approach also extends to sludge management, generating over 143,000 metric tons of wet sludge annually, all of which is used in agriculture, either directly or through composting.
The REGEN-IA project in the Region of Murcia builds on this foundation to support the transition toward more advanced water cycle management. It combines digitalization, artificial intelligence, and operational analytics to enhance the efficiency, traceability, and predictive capabilities of the regional wastewater treatment and reclamation system. The project is part of the third call for proposals under Spain’s PERTE for the Digitalization of the Water Cycle and addresses the need to provide ESAMUR with monitoring and decision-support tools designed for an extensive wastewater treatment and reclamation system characterized by intensive water reuse and severe water scarcity.
Challenges
ESAMUR operates in one of Europe’s most demanding water contexts, characterized by structural resource scarcity, recurring droughts, and the strategic value of treated and reclaimed water for water security, environmental protection, and the region’s circular economy. Against this background, the role of ESAMUR’s infrastructure extends beyond basic wastewater collection and treatment, requiring it to serve as a critical regional asset, with a direct impact on the quality of water bodies, the availability of alternative resources, and regional resilience.
In addition to severe water scarcity, increasingly stringent regulatory and environmental requirements call for tighter controls on discharges, improved operational traceability, better management of rainfall events, and closer monitoring of discharges to receiving waters. This is compounded by growing pressure regarding transparency and cooperation among government agencies, the water authority, municipal governments, and other water cycle stakeholders. In this context, one of ESAMUR’s major challenges was to streamline system management by overcoming the fragmentation of tools and information sources and creating a centralized platform capable of integrating operational, environmental, energy, and meteorological data across the region.
In addition, the project sought to improve energy efficiency and control operating costs by implementing smarter energy management capable of linking operations, demand, generation, and costs; anticipating deviations; comparing performance across treatment plants; and strengthening energy self-sufficiency. Ultimately, the goal was to lay the groundwork for a more efficient, interoperable, and transparent operating model capable of meeting the evolving demands of water cycle management.
Solutions
The REGEN-IA project, built on the Xylem Vue platform, aims to integrate, govern, and leverage ESAMUR’s operational information within a single environment. Its modular architecture consolidates data from SCADA, IoT sensors, GIS, laboratories, maintenance, and external weather sources, creating a corporate data lake capable of handling up to 15,000 signals and 48 WWTPs. The solution builds upon this foundation to establish a common digital ecosystem for operational monitoring, analysis, and management of data from the regional wastewater treatment system.
The core of this architecture is the Smart Water Engine (SWE), together with the IoT Core and Domain Master Data (DMD) components, which are responsible for data ingestion, standardization, storage, and governance. The Plant Management application is deployed on top of this layer for operational monitoring via dashboards, synoptic diagrams, alarms, reports, and configurable screens. The solution also includes the Real-Time What-If Scenarios application for the digital twin and operational simulation, with advanced modeling at the Torre Pacheco WWTP and rule-based algorithms for the remaining facilities.
The solution also includes the HMET / B-RAIN meteorological module, designed to integrate weather forecasts, radar data, and alerts for managing extreme events; the energy efficiency module, focused on monitoring energy consumption, generation, and self-sufficiency; and SSD Optim, for sludge drying optimization. Furthermore, the Plant Management application includes specific features associated with the user portal, shared governance with the public water authority and municipal governments, and connectivity with the Spanish National Water Observatory through screens and functionalities tailored to each use case defined in the specifications.
Results
The REGEN-IA project's objective is to enable ESAMUR to move toward a more efficient, proactive, standardized regional operating model, underpinned by a single platform that integrates operational, energy, environmental, and meteorological data. The combination of advanced analytics, a digital twin, energy monitoring, and rainfall forecasting aims to strengthen oversight of the treatment plant network, provide earlier anomaly detection, and improve decision-making in response to incidents, load variations, and weather events. Internally, the utility aims to gain greater control over plant performance, improve comparability between facilities, and track energy efficiency and operating costs more accurately.
The project also seeks to strengthen ESAMUR’s contribution to the circular water economy, the region’s climate adaptation, and better coordinated governance of the regional system. Improvements in process control, quality, and operational efficiency aim to maximize the value of treated water reclamation and reuse, sludge management, and energy recovery associated with plant operations, while improving environmental monitoring of discharges, overflows, and rainfall events in environmentally sensitive areas. Likewise, the platform will strengthen ESAMUR’s position as a key coordination hub for government agencies and stakeholders, facilitating the secure exchange of information, transparency, shared governance, and reporting capabilities to various agencies, as well as to the Spanish National Water Observatory.