Jubail Industrial City’s Smart Irrigation System

Jubail Industrial City’s Smart Irrigation System is a city-scale digital water-management infrastructure that uses centralized monitoring and automated controls to manage landscape irrigation efficiently across industrial and urban areas. It is presented as the world’s largest integrated smart irrigation network and is positioned as a key component of Jubail’s environmental management and smart city infrastructure.^{1 2}

The project envisions a “digitally managed, resource-efficient irrigation system” that strengthens environmental sustainability, optimizes landscape water use, and supports climate-responsive urban management at metropolitan scale. The project seeks to optimize irrigation operations in real time, reduce water losses, and maximize the reuse of treated water through automation and centralized control. It operates at full city scale, covering all landscaped and green areas of Jubail Industrial City.^{3 4}

To implement the vision, the project combines a large physical irrigation network with a unified smart control and monitoring platform. Key components include:^{5 6 7}

• Irrigation network: Over 11,600 km of irrigation pipelines across the city.
• Digital control and monitoring: Centralized control center managing citywide irrigation operations, with more than 12,200 smart devices / automated units connected, and approximately 1.2 million data signals processed daily
• Water reuse performance: Around 2.8 million cubic meters of treated water reused per month for irrigation

The system advances water efficiency, circular water use, and operational sustainability by prioritizing treated wastewater for irrigation and replacing manual operations with automated, data-driven control. Digital optimization has reportedly reduced operation and maintenance costs by more than 35%, while supporting increased vegetation cover and climate-adaptive urban landscaping.^{8 9}

The smart irrigation system is owned and operated by the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu (RCJY) as part of its infrastructure and city operations mandate in Jubail Industrial City. It functions as a continuously optimized city service, with performance monitoring and system upgrades integrated into the Royal Commission’s long-term environmental and urban management strategy.^{10 11}