IoT-Driven Sensor Selection for Smart Water and Electricity Systems: A TOPSIS and VIKOR Approach

In the era of smart cities and intelligent resource management, the need for precise and efficient sensing devices is increasingly critical. Among essential infrastructures are water and electricity systems, which necessitate continuous monitoring to optimize consumption, detect anomalies, and reduce operational costs. Several commercial sensors for water metering and electricity metering are available on the market, each differing in precision, power consumption, communication protocols, and durability. This diversity creates a decisional challenge when choosing the best sensor for a certain application. We report herein a comparative study of various water and electricity sensors by means of a multi-criteria decision-making approach. We adopt TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) and VIKOR (VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje), two robust quantitative MCDM techniques. The carefully selected set of evaluation criteria and a wide range of sensors commonly used were analyzed. It turned out that the ranking was different based on context and application; therefore, valuable insights have been provided for engineers, system designers, and decision-makers in the IoT domain. It is expected that the present study will be of practical help for choosing the best sensors in smart metering applications and prove the efficiency of integrated decision models in technical evaluations.