Cognitive Digital Twin: The Single Essential Technology Needed to Optimize Water Utility Operations and Maintenance

Introduction

There is currently widespread concern regarding the condition of the nation’s drinking water infrastructure. The most recent American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card assigns US drinking water infrastructure a near failing grade of “D” based on condition, safety, capacity, and other factors. This is far from a “B” letter grade describing a state of good repair and posing a minimal risk, or an “A” letter grade, signifying a standard of resilience and capacity that is fit for the future. This problem is further exacerbated by a confluence of daunting challenges now facing water utilities. A perfect storm is brewing that could further drastically impact the continuity and long-term sustainability of the country’s near crisis-level aging water infrastructure systems and the delivery of expected service levels to customers. The American Water Works Association (AWWA) 2020 State of the Water Industry (SOTWI) reports that the top three issues facing water utilities, regardless of size and prior to the coronavirus outbreak, are (1) renewal and replacement of aging infrastructure, (2) financing for capital improvements, and (3) long-term water supply availability.

The pandemic, with its social distancing of workforce and disruptions in the supply chain, has combined with a distressed US economy and extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts and firestorms to create a maelstrom of tightening budgets, staff and revenue reductions, decreasing capital spending, growing workloads, and widening infrastructure investment gaps. Tourism and convention activities have been canceled, sports arenas and recreation centers have closed, schools have emptied, and many fitness and health clubs, hotels, restaurants and bars are operating at far below maximum capacity. All these factors translate to reductions in both water consumption and rate revenues. Water shutoffs for non-payment, increased late payments due to high unemployment, and fewer new customers worsen the problem. AWWA and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) estimate that water utilities will experience a negative aggregate financial impact of $13.9 billion by 2021 due to revenue losses and increased operational costs during the pandemic. This drop in revenue will require water utilities to scale back projects to help manage cash flows. They may also experience additional future revenue losses due to deferrals of planned water rate increases. It is uncertain when full economic activity will resume.

State and local governments do not fare any better. They have made an array of fiscal maneuvers to stay solvent, including issuing less debt, spending cuts, layoffs and furloughs to offset plunging tax revenues. With little or no help from state and local governments, this confluence of challenging developments marks the beginning of a difficult era for the entire water industry. Ensuring continuity of operations while absorbing severe budget cuts has never been more important or more challenging for water utilities.

The most powerful tool for managing all these challenges is the cognitive Digital Twin (CDT). This intelligent platform combines all operations, maintenance, engineering, GIS, and process data used across the whole asset life cycle with learning and predictive capabilities. Then it makes the entire spectrum readily available for everyone in the enterprise, at any time and on any device. The CDT uses recombinant engineering, information and operational technologies to create something greater than the sum of its parts, providing cost, efficiency and performance benefits beyond what each element could offer individually. The platform is continuously updated as the water infrastructure is operated, providing an accurate representation of its current condition (health) and performance. The result is right-time autonomous insight and actionable knowledge that empower water utilities to optimize and transform their businesses and keep their water infrastructures operating well into the future at the lowest lifecycle cost. CDT use can lead to reduced costs, new revenue opportunities, and improved overall business operations.

Digital Twin where the virtual and physical seamlessly fuse

The Digital Twin

Water utilities are using various types of disconnected digital twins for managing their water infrastructure systems, including engineering twins (e.g., hydraulic and asset performance models); information twins (e.g., CAD, GIS, CRM, maintenance and billing systems); and operational twins (e.g., SCADA). But these twins are housed within, often entrenched, departmental silos available only to small groups of users for specific activities (point solutions). This has created data-rich, information-poor and software-solution-fatigued end users. Limiting the flow of information across internal boundaries, combined with the lack of digital twins interoperability and compatibility, has prevented water utilities from harnessing this data to derive the actionable insight needed to make better decisions and drive better outcomes. Establishing a cognitive digital twin with data intelligence that drives a connected water infrastructure system bridges that gap, uniting resources and shifting operations from point solutions to a utility-wide focus with cross-departmental value.

What is a Cognitive Digital Twin?

A cognitive Digital Twin is an intelligent platform that seamlessly combines engineering, information and operational data and models with learning and predictive capabilities. It then makes them readily available in real time and the right context for everyone in the enterprise - from finance and plant managers to engineers, planners, and field staff - to proactively solve or prevent problems. CDTs give water utilities the ability to see, understand, coordinate and respond not just to what is happening now in their water infrastructures, but what will happen in the future, and helps them realize the true essence of physical-digital convergence.

Cognitive Digital Twin enables water utilities to see, understand, coordinate and respond not just to what is happening now in their water infrastructures, but what will happen in the future

In sharp contrast to static visualization twins, the CDT is continuously updated as the water infrastructure is operated. The figure below shows the flow of information among the connected systems which forms its foundation. The CDT becomes the central database of information for collecting, merging, managing, analyzing, updating, and using data from all disparate sources. This capability allows users to make informed decisions and execute quickly on a consistent basis. Data integration through a central database allows users to make changes to the information which are reflected throughout the enterprise. This eliminates both redundant information and constant synchronization between departmental databases, and increases productivity. It also enables each department to operate within a centralized workflow by allowing many users access to the same accurate real time data.

Cognitive Digital Twin enables interoperability across enterprise technologies

All areas of water utility operations benefit from such cognitive analytics and contextual data. Operators and maintenance staff are able to effectively coordinate main replacement projects to minimize downtime and disturbance to roadways and maintain adequate service levels by comparing those projects with nearby pavement repair and other construction projects and assessing their impact on pressure, fire flow capacity and water quality. Routine field inspections such as pump- and well- specific capacity tests are replaced with a monitoring dashboard. Important business data such as the cost of purchasing or processing water, volume of water pumped from wells and plants, and water losses are continuously monitored and instantly accessible. Preparing for seasonal and climate-driven changes in water usage and distribution system behavior or life changing-events (e.g., COVID-19) that cause unexpected operational changes is quickly addressed. Predicting when a pipe will likely fail and whether to replace or upsize it, as well as determining minimum night flow, leakage rate and diurnal pattern for each pressure zone, tank turnover time and mixing, operating pump best efficiency point (BEP), are among the many calculations now readily available and fully automated.

Cognitive Digital Twin centralizes the storage and maintenance of decision-critical information

Because the CDT offers a complete picture of the overall water infrastructure in a high fidelity operational dashboard, utility staff can clearly see and better understand what’s happening and what’s scheduled to happen, predict and plan for future events, and assess the impact of proposed schemes. This is the pathway to optimized planning, operations and performance and resilient and sustainable infrastructure outcomes.

Anatomy of a Cognitive Digital Twin

Water utilities, especially those of small to medium size, are prevented from rapidly adopting technology by wealth, time, and access barriers. To eliminate these barriers, the CDT works effortlessly and gets the job done in the simplest way. Its objective function is convenience and accessibility, while the constraint is price.

Working through server-based technology, the CDT is essentially the concatenation of three seamlessly linked components, each with a specific role and functionality:

1. Water infrastructure simulator

As a water infrastructure “flight simulator,” this module allows water utilities to reliably explore and investigate many solutions (“what if” scenarios) without putting the infrastructure, public health, or the environment at risk. It arms utilities with descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, while dynamically recalibrating an accurate digital twin model of the operating water infrastructure (a necessary condition for making reliable predictive capabilities and testing and validating prescriptive actions). The simulator continuously updates current operating conditions (e.g., demand, tank level, pump and valve status and setting); fills performance visualization gaps (e.g., flow, velocity, pressure, headloss and water quality) for all unmonitored and unmanned locations without the need for additional equipment; and forecasts what might happen tomorrow and in the future and what actions (and trade-offs) should be taken to affect those outcomes -- making water utilities well prepared for worst-case scenarios.

Cognitive Digital Twin monitors water infrastructure performance in real time 

2. Operational intelligence model

This module gives water utilities 24/7/365 remote operational visibility (what is happening across the water infrastructure, including at all unmonitored and unmanned locations) with automated and intelligent alerts and incident and response simulations, allowing them to proactively manage events (e.g., fires, pipe breaks, pump outages). The model lets them identify and analyze trends and variations from operating norm compared with historical operating data, and enables them to calculate and monitor key performance indicators, asset condition and infrastructure performance. It also lets them instantly audit their water supplies, locate water loss locations, quantify and value losses, and devise cost-effective control programs to reduce non-revenue water (including unbilled and underbilled accounts). This combination of visualization and analytics helps water utilities identify cost-effective solutions and solve problems earlier. For example, CDT graphs showing revenue lost versus cost savings enable finance managers to instantly see if fixing meter issues could result in a significant new revenue source, and that the ROI could be significantly greater than fixing pipes. Why? Because cost savings (real losses) are multiplied by cost of water production, while revenue lost (apparent losses) is multiplied by the water tariff (treated water billed to consumers). Note that since revenue from wastewater also depends on water meter readings, the total revenue lost is the sum of revenue lost from water and wastewater.

Cognitive Digital Twin optimizes overall operational performance and drives savings

3. Asset risk-cost-effectiveness model

This module eliminates guesswork and replaces “run to failure” maintenance with proactive “fix before break” maintenance, using time to failure predictive algorithms that alert when an asset will need to be repaired or retired. It also automatically identifies and prioritizes assets at highest risk, considering both likelihood and consequence of failure; determines the most risk-cost-effective option for avoiding or correcting the problem and eliminating waste; and allocates capital expenditures to yield the greatest return on investment. These powers help to ensure that water infrastructure assets are safe, reliable, and efficient over their operating lives, and improve infrastructure resiliency.

Cognitive Digital Twin brings intelligence to water infrastructure maintenance and management

Benefits of Cognitive Digital Twins

 Cognitive Digital Twins have many applications across the water infrastructure lifecycle and offer significant potential business benefits. The low-hanging fruit is optimizing operations and maintenance and improving customer service. A CDT can be effectively used to instantly detect and isolate deficiencies, perform diagnostics and troubleshooting, predict outcomes and determine corrective actions to a much higher degree of accuracy, establish ideal maintenance schedules, reduce the cost and risk of both unplanned asset downtime and scheduled but unnecessary maintenance procedures, develop adaptive master planning and capital improvements, increase efficiency, reduce lifecycle costs and optimize infrastructure use and resiliency, and ultimately better serve customers. These capabilities improve proactive management and allow water utilities of all sizes to permanently reduce production, maintenance, emergency and operational costs and conserve both water and energy. This in turn helps them achieve better financial ratings and lower financing costs and generate new income to offset revenue shortfalls, eliminating the need to raise rates. Lower costs and increased revenues translate into larger working funds (cash flows). Simply put, CDTs enable water utilities to maintain essential services, sustain their infrastructures and keep their communities safe.

Cognitive Digital Twin delivers essential insights to improve water infrastructure operational yields

Conclusion

Cognitive Digital Twins give water utilities the power to transform operations and maintenance with actionable insights that drive improved business decisions and operational excellence. They enable utility staff to share detailed contextual data in real time, integrate and coordinate activities, and avoid potential issues. This arms them with the mission-critical capability to balance and optimize trade-offs between factors over which they previously had minimal visibility or control. CDTs also make it possible to safely and economically “experiment with the future” by exploring and evaluating what-if scenarios against business objectives. And because CDTs can be deployed in just a couple of days to a few weeks, they give small to medium sized utilities an unprecedented opportunity to optimize their water infrastructure management at low cost. For the first time, water utility staff can go to one place to get all the operations, maintenance, engineering, planning, finance and process data they need to do their work, find better ways to minimize costs and generate new sources of revenue, and better operate and sustain their water infrastructures. The use of CDTs is the next step in the future of water utility management; its possible applications are simply limitless.