The questions we have about the Smart Water Industry

There is a lot of confusion around the Smart Water Industry and what it can deliver. It is a part of the industry that is full of technologies that promise a lot but in reality are an answer to a solution that may or may not exist. This is what is know within the water companies as “the widget culture,” and in general technology providers are likely to get some cursory interest and not much more. So what are the question and what is the direction of the industry at the current time? The WWT Smart Water Networks conference asked some questions which highlighted the industries questions and also highlighted some of the areas of interest.

So, first to the questions.

What is Smart Water? Is there a definition?

The short answer to this question is no. There is no “official” definition of the “Smart Water Industry” in fact there are lots of different names for it including “Water 4.0” and “Digital Transformation. In reality this is very confusing and nobody really knows what it is all about. This of course encourages the “widget culture,” as technologies can be used to fit into the poorly defined culture. There are some resources though that may help people define themselves what it all means. The first is the SWAN Forum’s article on the SWAN Layers which was mainly designed around the Smart Potable Water Network and in reality mimics the earlier work of the Purdue Model and also looks similar to the OSI model of network communication. Additionally to this is the work that the German Water Partnership did when they first defined their definition of what Water 4.0 is . There are more definitions coming as various organisations define what Digital Transformation is. For me though, at least for the water industry, the whole Smart Water Industry is the using data to create situational awareness of how the anthropogenic water cycle (i.e. from source to customer and customer to discharge) to allow for informed decision making. This decision making can be by a person making manual operational decisions or by a machine allowing for active system control of the various networks, or real time control of treatment processes. At the centre of this of course the service that we give to customers by either informing them directly (e.g. about their water use) or increasing the efficiency of the system resulting in more efficient operational costs and ultimately cheaper bills for the customer

BIM, Digital Twin, analytics and Big Data are all interlinked. However they seem to be looked at separately within utilities - how do we join them up

In essence these are all technologies that are interlinked insofar as they can be applied to any industry but can form part of the whole of the water industry. They can be joined by many other technologies such as the Internet of Things (whether it is industrial or not) but again, like Smart Water, are actually badly defined. Some of these technologies are applicable to the water industry and some are not. Taking the examples of BIM and Digital Twins. Both these technologies could be seen as an approach of a technology being made to fit into the water industry however they do have their uses. The Water Infrastructure in the UK has necessarily had to relatively heavy on an infrastructure and construction approach. The number of assets that supply water and treat wastewater are actually vast and so the infrastructure level (Level 1) is big, there are always construction projects going on. In the past all of the information around these projects have been stored in reams of paper that nobody ever reads and so it was natural for BIM to be taken from the building industry and applied to the water industry. This, at least to me, allows for a huge amount of detail on the construction project to be recorded and fed into asset and operational models which will help in the long-term operation of the system as a whole. This can feed into both operational models for plant control and operational maintenance but can also be used to create Digital Twins. Now what do I mean by Digital Twins? The mistake that I am seeing a lot at the moment is that a Digital Twin is an operational model that can be used to control the system. It’s not, a Digital Twin is actually an offline model of the system that can be used for modelling how a system will react to operational systems. This can then be inputted into the real thing and the reactions of the live system used to alter the Digital Twin, using machine learning, so that the Digital Twin becomes more intelligent. An example of this for a discrete factory is to use a combination of 3D AutoCad and a Digital Twin approach to “build” a factory. This allows the function of the factory to be checked and altered before the physical factory is built. This has been very successfully applied by some of the largest automation companies in the world to ensure that the “concept” is right before anything is actually built. The Internet of Things (Level 3) is quite literally just a communication link between devices that facilitates Big Data and Analytics (Levels 4 & 5) which allows for informed decision making and analytics.

From an application point of view this can be used through the whole process of the construction of any part of the water and/or wastewater system using cognitive hydraulic models for the water or wastewater networks which ensures that water gets to the right place (the customer or the wastewater treatment works) using active system control or it can use Real Time Control or Multi-Variate Process Control to control a treatment works. In an operational environment the whole water/wastewater system can be brought together in a number of different models which inputs into a System of Systems approach from an Artificial Neural Network (an aspect of Artificial Intelligence) to show the affects of rain on both the potable and wastewater systems to a hydraulic model for the distribution networks, metering of the customer all the way to the control systems on treatment works.

At a site tech level do bespoke controllers have a future as most are now integrating their smart "apps" into connected PLCs or Edge Devices?

At a site level controllers are essential, there is no need for these controllers to be bespoke and in fact in the water industry they aren’t bespoke now. The various programmable logic controllers that are onsite are basically computers that do the controlling on site. These control modules within these devices tend to be programmed using a library of standard controls. This has allowed the industry to put consistency into the various control functions that are used. These are the “apps” of 15-20 years ago. There is an aspect of the “applification” of the water industry as we go to a more simplified approach so that people don’t need to understand the “standard way” of doing things but in reality we can’t reduce things down to the lowest common denominator as with any system you have to have fall-back approaches in case something goes wrong (an instrument failure for example). Keeping it simple the water and wastewater industry isn’t something that is necessarily common and so we can’t apply everything down to an application that we can control via a mobile phone so there will always be some aspect of “bespoke” but conversely there are some things that we can do in a standard way allowing the industry to make some efficiencies in both capital delivery and operations.

Do you feel the Water utilities have a digital roadmap and know where they are going and at what pace?

This very much depends upon what aspect of the “Smart” Water Industry is being talked about and whether you are talking about an individual application (a vertical segment) or the whole smart water piece (so a horizontal segment). What do I mean by this? Well an example of a vertical segment is non-revenue water, this is an area of the smart water industry that is very well developed and can be considered technologically mature. In this area, because leakage is a relatively simple business case to justify, the water companies tend to have a mature strategy that they have developed and are in fact delivering. It is a technology based strategy that incorporates everything from smart water meters to DMAs (that pre-dates the “smart” water industry by a very long way) to event management systems that work on rate of change algorithms to “detect” where there is the potential for leakage to be an ongoing problem. Conversely the horizontal segment is something that is starting to develop right now and so it will be fair to say that the Digital Roadmap is still being developed examples of this are in the visualisation and analytics of data and some areas need to be refreshed and strategies that have been used in the past changed due to increasing demands within the water industry. This is especially the case with Level 2 (Instrumentation & Control) and Level 3 (Telemetry). In all fairness the main problems in these areas are legacy issues that over time will be resolved but there is no point changing something that is currently working and hasn’t reached the end of their asset life.

What is obvious in the UK is that the whole area of “Smart” Water/”Digital Transformation” is becoming a more and more popular subject area. Some of the very large water companies have taken this on-board and are coming out with investment plans for a transformational change within the water industry. These plans will have a strategic basis as they will be backed up by a business case. Whether this takes advantage of the full benefits that “Smart” Water can bring is certainly debateable but whether or not there are plans in place is beyond doubt.

Change, skills and of course data

If we take on board that data is fundamentally at the core of the Smart Water Industry then there are several questions that were asked that were very apt including

• How do we value data
• Can you change people or do you need to “change” people
• When trying to implement smart systems into treatment works then do you see much resistance from managers of those sites
• No one has mentioned the skills shortage, what are the proposals to bridge the skills gap and can AI help this gap
• Are the data analysts in the back office as important as the engineers out in the field?
• What are the ethical implications of deploying smart tech, condition-based monitoring and AI
• There are a lot of people who want to help provide smarter solutions if only water companies provide access to their data. How can we solve this?

The key question here is how do we value data and the quick answer to this is the data has to be used, it has to have a point to it as if it doesn’t then the value of the data that we use drops to less than zero as not only is it not used it also costs money in terms of sensor replacement and communicating the data. The value of the data that we collect is key and it must not be data for the sake of data, but it has to allow for situational awareness and informed decision making in short it has to be useful information. As soon as data can be converted into useful information then any resistance on the ground falls away. Probably one of the best-case studies in recent times is Severn Trent Water’s project at their wastewater treatment works at Spernal. This was a project that was driven by site operations and brought the data sources together into a works-based information system. This brought together the three elements of the technology triangle i.e. systems, people and technology to deliver a project that truly used information this allowed the operators on site to see all of the information that was needed and allowed for informed decision making. This also had the effect of making an operations-led change to the works and increase the operational efficiency as a result. This obviously required not only special skills that were available within the business such as the ICA specialists.

This is obviously the day to day operational data but there are occasions when on a larger-based system of system approach where data analyst teams are key to providing informational resources and this is an area that the water industry is developing at the moment. These are the areas that the likes of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence come into force and these areas do struggle in terms of the available skills especially as the people within this area also need domain knowledge in terms of how the water industry works. This is where educational programmes dealing with hydroinformatics come into play and although there is a limited skill base at the moment it is developing. This is where collaboration across the industry becomes vitally important and some of the water companies have opened up their data through the various Open Data Iniatives (https://www.yorkshirewater.com/open-data/) which will allow an industry collaborative innovation based approach to delivering the smart water industry

And where do ethics come in? There are ethical issues about sharing data such as customer consumption data but if anonymised, as done in the medical industry, then some of these ethical issues should disappear. The other ethical issue is in people doing various tasks that they are not qualified to do and this is more of a problem but it is where there needs to be strong governance issues to ensure that someone who has the domain knowledge and knows the implications of what is proposed so that any potential risk is mitigated.

Delivering the smart water industry – its all about the application

There are several reasons why we should deliver a “Smart” Water Industry. We have seen the application of informed decision making in the area of non-revenue water with some good case studies presented on the day. The island of Sant Ferran was a good example of this with the installation of smart meter which increased the annual meter reads from around 9,000 to over 2 million for somewhere that has a population of just over 1,000 people. The need was water resources were short on an island which has a tourist population which outnumbers the residential population. In this case smart meters allow for a better management of water resources which is obvious business case. The same can be said in the UK where warnings over the availability of water are stark.

In reality to deliver this something that is key is the concept of collaboration. There are several entrants by companies into the smart water market and has been over the past decade. There is the case of Innovyze and the Southern Water Smart Wastewater network which gave operators situational awareness in order to optimise the network and to reduce the risk of operation from a number of risk factors including climatic risk. More recently is the asset management partnership approach between Yorkshire Water and the engineering consultant Black & Veatch which looks at asset risk. This approach can of course work with any water industry operating company. The advent of smart water networks is almost becoming normal across the industry and several of the water companies are at least operating in the area although it is somewhat piecemeal as there is no need to convert everything to this approach only the areas which have the largest risk.

There is a long way to go in the development of a “Smart” Water industry and there are several challenges to address including how we are actually going to deliver it and this has come out in several sessions that have been run by the strategy company +Add Strategy when they have delivered workshops within this area when looking at the barriers to adoption of the Smart Water Industry. These include:

• Intelligence cost to scale unclear            
• Approaches to procuring scale intelligence are unclear
• Lack of experience / expertise in transitioning from old to new forms of intelligence    
• Cost of predictability – Lack of clarity of cost of higher volume data processing for insight             
• Lack of confidence in resilience of monitoring systems and telemetry offered

As well as the current issues with the data and available insight at the moment including:

• Focus – We are unsure if we are recording the right information to create useful insights
• Data quality – A lack of trust in ‘data’ from the network in enabling clear decisions/ automating decisions
• Lack of customer data and effective insight availability
• Standardisation-Current issues with systems not communicating with each-other and not being agnostic
• Asset conditions-We do not know what the asset condition baseline is/ what is the starting point?

All of these issues are concerns for the water industry at the current time and these are the barriers that we have to address if the industry is to take a step forward. They are in fact issues that we have faced for many years. Standardisation has been partly addressed by protocols such as the Water Industry Telemetry Standard Protocol which is based on DNP3 but as we solve one issue another crops up with “apps” being developed by individual manufacturers meaning that no one application will suit all instrumentation on a site and so on. Data quality has been a perennial problem and this can be addressed by simple operation and maintenance of the instrumentation asset base and where this has been done there are some powerful examples of where pollution events can be detected before they happen or non-revenue water levels have shrunk as there is meter error. All of these have come out of discussion in events this year where companies have collaborated mainly due to the work done by firms such as +Add Strategy to bring to the forefront any resistance to the Smart Water Industry. These have brought about Challenge Areas which, for the wastewater network, include:

These challenge areas of course have to be brought into application but any application must address the concerns. From these challenge areas we can see that data is at the centre of all of this and its conversion into information and insight the key. 

About this article

This article was based upon the activities that took place at the 2019 WWT Smart Water Networks Conference including the questions that were asked by the audience and some of the answers that resulted. It was also largely based upon the wastewater network breakout session that was chaired by Oliver Grievson of Z-Tech, WIPAC & SWIG as well as being facilitated by Paul Sutherland of +Add Strategy.

There are some events coming up that readers may well be interested in including

• ideaLAB - Asset health index initiative
• ideaLAB - 14th May ideaLAB on Smart Meter future service.To inform development of data strategy for smart meter rollout
• ideaLAB - June - Reducing PCC using Customer insight