Smart network monitoring helps water companies prevent flooding and reduce pollution.

Abwassermanagement

Detectronic helps water companies with wastewater management. To get the most out of your wastewater network monitoring programme, skilled analysts within the Detectronic data centre audit different data sets to build a detailed history of a site. They correlate the data against other environmental factors and develop models to generate the right metrics, alarm profiles and indicators.

A SCADA system for a water company can have hundreds or thousands of alarms. When a company has more alarms, there is an increased risk of more alarms becoming active at any one time. That also means there is an increased risk of more false or unnecessary alarms being triggered. The consequence being that an overwhelmed operator dismisses them all as a group. In this case, the alarm system becomes a distraction rather than a useful resource.

Detectronic has a rich history of working with water companies to monitor water flow rates and effluent levels at CSO’s and other critical points in the network.

Before reporting on potential flooding or pollution incidents, analysts review what is happening with the surrounding catchment. This allows them to make accurate assessments as to the necessary actions required. The assessment of additional variables massively reduces the number of false alarms. This means wastewater management resources can be directed to the most critical sites needing intervention.

What the Data is Telling You

Water flow meter and Level Meters generate alarms for high (or low) levels, normally associated with spill levels or other operationally monitored parameters. Not all alarms require an action, particularly those caused by rainfall events where a monitored CSO performs within its designed criteria.

Increasingly, Detectronic is monitoring pass forward flows to treatment and identifying if a CSO is performing to its original design criteria and agreed consent. Current alarm settings are generally associated with a failure condition and cannot in themselves facilitate any intervention that would prevent flooding and/ or pollution.

The Detectronic data screening process:

• Stimulates early customer interventions which prevent incidents from occurring
• Eliminates alarms which require no further action
• Filters false alarms caused either by temporary abnormal hydraulic conditions (or spurious data)
• Schedules Detectronic site visits to provide for robust data and customer confidence
• Maintains high quality for data delivered – and system confidence
• Develops an understanding of each site’s performance and trends

Intelligent Algorithms

Cloud based automated AI systems use predictive analytics to turn raw data into insights. Once a profile of “normal sewer behaviour” is established, anomaly detection is used to build an advanced automated alarm system. The alarm profiles allow the systems to prioritise severe disturbances from small disturbances, resulting in greater confidence in the system when alarms are forwarded.