The Water Information Hub (WIH) is the technology at the heart of IBM Intelligent Operations for Water. In the next couple of postings I am going to try to explain what it is, and how we use it to solve some real water problems.
The WIH provides us with two main technological capabilities. The first is the ability to bring together water related data from many different sources and present a single view of the water network. The second is a more advanced concept that allows us to add advance analytics, such as leak detection to this view and enhances our overall understanding of the water network.
Before we go into more detail on the WIH, let's first look at the different world water markets. Water, or H2O, is one of the few molecules that the average person will know the chemical structure of. It is a simple molecule with two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom in a V shape. However, for such a simple molecule it is, along with other things a universal solvent, the source of all life, and makes up over 90% of human body.
The applications of this vital, simple water molecule here on Earth, however, are anything but simple. It helps to think of these applications in terms of broad water markets. I will delve more into these markets in future posts but for now lets just outline the broad water market into categories, such as, water sourcing and distribution, waste water, flood management, ports, and harbors.
Below is a picture of Harvey, my basset hound, fleeing from a small tidal wave, on a local beach near where we live. Here I am poking fun at the poor fellow, but the realities of Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, to name a couple, have shown us first hand the devastating effects of a storm surge and the importance of effective flood management solutions and the pressing need to understand how water effects us.
Next, let us consider a hypothetical water utility company based in Austin, TX called the Sunshine Water Group (SWG). One of the areas that the SWG specializes in is water sourcing and distribution. In very simple terms, water sourcing and distribution involves sourcing potable water and delivering in to the end user, typically a business or a residence. Jack is a water utlity operator who works for SWG and is just a week away from retirement (I'm just kidding, like myself he has a good few years to go yet!). Jack's job is to look after the overall health of the water distribution network which he monitors from a computer screen.
However, all of the water related information that Jack needs to do his job is scattered over a number of different systems and databases that do not talk to, or even know about each other. For example, SWG will have all of their asset data (such as pipes, pumps, manholes, work orders, etc.,) in an enterprise asset management system, all of their water meter data in an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system, all of their sensor data such as pressure, water quality, flow, etc., in a sensor or SCADA system, and all of the customer data in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
The power of the water information hub is the ability to bring all of this data together and provide a unified view of the water network. In other words, our friend Jack won't even know that all of SWG water data lives in different systems, all he will see is, for example, a single view of the pipe network overlaid on the city of Austin so he can see where the water meters are and what customers they serve. He can narrow down to one single pipe and know everything about that pipe, such as, who made the pipe, how old is the pipe, what customers does this pipe serve, and what is the work order history of this pipe.
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| The Water Information Hub |
You might say - big deal, what's the value of seeing all of the data from disparate systems in one place? Well, once the data, which is often in unique, proprietary formats has been brought together and made comparable ("normalized" as the geeks say) all sorts of possibilities open up. You can start to see patterns across data that could point to potential problems and opportunities. You can compare similar systems (say pH sensors) and judge their performance to make better operational and capital investment decisions. You can even set up rules that cut across systems (for example, if the demand for water falls below X gallons and the storage tanks in the city are showing 75% full, turn off the water pumps that are consuming a ton of electricity to run)
It's as though you were hitherto listening to a crowd of people talking in different languages and you could just listen and understand them one (or a few at most) at a time - but now you can hear them all talk the same language, communicate with each other easily and tell you stories about what your entire water/wastewater network is up to, not just a piece of it, but the holistic view.
The core technology behind the WIH is a semantic model of the water network. For now think of a semantic model as a flexible model that allows us to connect up information from different sources and, for example, allows Jack to ask questions like what pipe is associated with what customers. There is a lot more to semantic models that this and we will return to this concept again and again throughout this blog, but for now it allows Jack to do his job better because he can look at the water network as a whole and ask the kind of questions that a water operator needs to ask.
In the next post we will look as the second aspect of the WIH that we mentioned earlier, that is the ability to enhance our understanding of the water network by adding intelligence to it
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