An agent based framework for residential water usage modelling under social stimuli

SmartH2O is an EU funded project aimed at increasing users' awareness about their water usage via a gamified platform where detailed information and statistics about the water usage patterns in the users' households are reported. Platform users can compete against each other in achieving the highest water usage reductions, thus stimulating virtuous behaviours. Such gamified portal also provides players' water usage data to an agent-based forecasting module which enables water utilities to get insights on the aggregate water usage of entire districts and on the effect of specific strategies to reduce/reallocate water usage, exploiting e.g. sensitivity to the social spreading of eco-friendly behaviours, by means of what-if experiments. In this paper we present the agent-based model, describe its building blocks and show its application to relevant use-cases by focusing on the social interaction aspect.