According to the relevant requirements of smart water conservancy and digital twin engineering construction, by integrating the modern artificial intelligence and water dispatching professional knowledge, the definition and basic functions of smart water dispatching for the South-to-North Water Diversion Middle Route Project are tentatively proposed in this paper combined with the tasks and responsibilities of water transportation scheduling. Through analyzing the logical relationship between intelligence and wisdom, this paper systematically discusses the key technologies, existing shortcomings, and improvement suggestions for the smart water transportation and dispatching in the middle route from the perspectives of perceptual intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and decision-making intelligence. With respect to the perception intelligence, it should be a combination of non-contact and contact measurement, a mixture of machine vision and traditional sensors, and an integration of automatic monitoring and manual inspection. Data cleaning technology is required to support the multi-source data fusion. In the cognition intelligence, a framework is suggested by integrating mechanism studying and data mining. From the perspective of prediction, early warning, rehearsal and emergency plan, the key technologies and modeling requirements of water dispatching were comprehensively analyzed, and the regulation strategy model, simulation model, prediction and early warning model, Self-adaptive model, and so on should be constructed. In terms of intelligent decision-making for the dispatch of the middle route, a regulation approach based on simulation deduction as feedforward and real-time monitoring as feedback is proposed. An automated water dispatching regulation strategy based on rolling decision correction and real-time response is established, and a multi-objective optimization dispatch model should be constructed.