Description:

Managing the water/wastewater infrastructure efficiently and effectively is an absolute requirement. The project concept is to deploy a fleet of asset management and tracking devices, sensors and other communication gateways, along with complimenting analytics and data platform to:
1. Lower the life cycle cost to own and operate the infrastructure assets by identifying likelihood of failures early, and fixing it before catastrophic failure.
2. Use real time data to continuously optimize unit and system process performances

Challenges:

Water sector is a very fragmented market and very risk averse in general. This pose a challenge to attract viable technology partners to commit the required upfront investment to create some of the enabling hardware and software.

The limited capacity to allocate the required staff time and resources, in the event some of product development life cycle extends longer than originally estimated.

Major Requirements:

1. Identify a few unit process for use case demonstration, which is scalable to system level application
2. Develop asset list for the selected processes and standardized attributes and bill of materials.
3. Perform failure mode evaluations and identify optimized preventive and predictive maintenance.
4. Develop prognostic maintenance analytics for each asset.
5. Develop required wireless sensors and communication gateways to accommodate analog, digital and wireless communication.

Performance Targets/ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

1. Reduce catastrophic failures by 75%
2. Optimize the system performance to reduce the energy use by 15%
3. Extend the projected useful life of the asset by 20%
4. Enable mobile workflow management to increase the crew productivity by 20%

Measurement Methods:

1. Reduction in response time, to customer issues, by 20%
2. Reduction in customer issues (customer service issue calls) by 20%
3. Improvement in customer satisfaction ratings by 10%

Standards/Interoperability:

1. There are no clear user requirements and unified standards for the wireless application, especially for the water sector.
2. Work with international organizations like Smart Water Network (SWAN) and National Association Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) to develop industry requirements and implement related standards. The project team is actively working with both organizations.

Project Impacts:

1. Effective and efficient water/wastewater infrastructure management has direct benefits to public health (reliable high quality drinking water), public safety (fire safety) and environmental (Swimmable fishable receiving streams) quality
2. It has direct impact on quality of life and social justice.

Demonstration/Deployment Phases:

Phase I Pilot/Demonstration June 2016:

Successful application of smart asset management to a sanitary sewer pump station and storm water pump station.

Phase II Deployment June 2017:
Successfully scale the smart water application at system level in wastewater, and an integrated application with district transportation authority as a smart city initiative.