Key Takeaways In Washington, the City of Bellevue wanted to break away from the inefficiency of siloed operations and create a unified, data‐based, smart‐city strategy across all city departments. The Bellevue Smart Team tested a water module in its new City Portal, starting with a dashboard that would organize and optimize data for a better customer, utility, and city experience. The platform used to set up the City Portal allows for flexibility in adding modules and adopting new technologies.

After the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the follow-up risk assessments by utilities across the United States, securing the water distribution system against malevolent attack became a strategic goal for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Following 3 years of development work on a Contamination Warning System (CWS) at the Greater Cincinnati Water Works, four major cities across the United States were selected to enhance the CWS development conducted by the USEPA. One of the major efforts undertaken was to develop a process to seamlessly process "Big Data" sets in real time from different sources (online water quality monitoring, consumer complaints, enhanced security, public health surveillance, and sampling and analysis) and graphically display actionable information for operators to evaluate and respond to appropriately. The most significant finding that arose from the development and implementation of the "dashboard" were the dual benefits observed by all four utilities: the ability to enhance their operations and improve the regulatory compliance of their water distribution systems. Challenge: While most of the utilities had systems in place for SCADA, Work Order Management, Laboratory Management, 311 Call Center Management, Hydraulic Models, Public Health Monitoring, and GIS, these systems were not integrated, resulting in duplicate data entry, which made it difficult to trace back to a "single source of truth." Each one of these data sources can produce a wealth of raw data. For most utilities, very little of this data is being translated into actionable information as utilities cannot overwhelm their staffs with manually processing the mountains of data generated. Instead, utilities prefer to provide their staffs with actionable information that is easily understood and provides the basis for rapid decision-making. Smart grid systems were developed so utilities can essentially find the actionable needle in the haystack of data. Utilities can then focus on rapidly evaluating the new information, compare it known activities occurring in the system, and identify the correct level of response required. Solution: CH2M HILL was engaged to design, implement, integrate, and deploy a unified spatial dashboard/smart grid system. This system included the processes, technology, automation, and governance necessary to link together the disparate systems in real time and fuse these data streams to the GIS. The overall solution mapped the business process involved with the data collection, the information flow requirements, and the system and application requirements. With these fundamentals defined, system integration was implemented to ensure that the individual systems worked together, eliminating need for duplicate data entry and manual processing. The spatial dashboard was developed on top of the integration platform, allowing the underlying component data streams to be visualized in a spatial setting. Result: With the smart grid system in place, the utilities had a straightforward method to determine the ...

Utilities analyze a fraction of the data collected, losing valuable information and its benefits. Improved sensor technologies and firmware applications, big data analytics tools, and embedded Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication can collect and evaluate more of these data. M2M communication embeds wireless technologies and data analytics into sensors and instruments to interact with firmware and provide additional intelligence. With no need to install hard-wired communication systems and infrastructure, cost savings and shorter implementation times result. Utilities will be able to adopt M2M technologies directly, retrofit existing assets, integrate multiple technologies with an M2M smart system, or use integrated M2M sensor combinations.

No abstract

Utilities often use less than 40 percent of the data they generate, leaving potentially valuable information unused. Our goal is to avoid inundating operators with voluminous raw data, instead presenting solutions to automatically link and interpret data streams, instead providing insight and actionable information to respond to a problem. We can utilize solutions from other areas to find relationships, process data into understandable "chunks," and provide visualizations for more direct interpretation and understanding. Gathering and monitoring data in real time allows mining these data for details that aid in day-to-day operations, regulatory compliance, and cost savings.