An intelligent and explainable IoT-Edge-Cloud architecture for real-time water quality monitoring

Abstract

Continuous and reliable monitoring of water quality is critical for early detection of environmental deterioration, yet conventional monitoring approaches are often slow and lack timely data availability. This study proposes an intelligent and explainable internet of things (IoT)–Edge–Cloud architecture to monitor water quality in real time, using IoT sensing, edge based artificial intelligence (Edge AI), cloud-stream processing, and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). The system calculates the water quality index (WQI) directly at the edge and predicts its evolution using a stacking ensemble model trained on physicochemical measurements taken from the Moulouya River Basin in Morocco. An explainability module based on Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) values gives a clearer image of the contribution of various parameters to WQI predictions, providing transparency of the features, which builds trust in the model’s output. The proposed architecture was implemented as an end-to-end prototype and validated using a simulation-based experimental that mimicked realistic sensor dynamics and connectivity interruptions. The experimental results show strong predictive performance (R² =0.945), stable system operations, and reliable interpretability highlighting the potential of the proposed approach for scalable, intelligent, and transparent environmental monitoring.