Water, Weather & Environment
Securing urban drinking water supplies
Implementing a water security initiative
The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) and Water Revenue Bureau serve the Greater Philadelphia region by providing integrated water, wastewater, and storm water services. The utility’s primary mission is to plan for, operate and maintain the infrastructure and the organization necessary to supply quality drinking water, to provide an adequate and reliable clean water supply for all household, commercial and community needs; and to sustain and enhance the region’s watersheds and quality of life by managing wastewater and storm water effectively.
- The challenge
- The solution
- The benefits
The challenge
The challenge
Whether providing safe water for residents to drink, supplying water for industries to manufacture goods, or protecting the region’s water resources, the Philadelphia Water Department has a commitment to serving residents with clean & safe water — throughout its nearly 200-year history.
The fulfill this commitment, Philly Water required an IT partner to meet its extensive list of demands:
- Acquire and store water quality sensor measurement and sensor state data (calibration/maintenance status) at two
minute intervals - Perform automated data validation based on sensor state status.
- Perform validation based on client and industry business rules to determine whether the data are appropriate for assessing water quality
- Analyze data to assess water quality and sensor states
- Generate and terminate alarms based on sensor states and water quality thresholds
- Achieve 99.9% availability
- Send alarm / alerts via SMS (text) and email notifications
- Escalate alarm notifications to appropriate personnel and groups of personnel
- Generate standard and user-configured reports with qualitative data
- Control access to all data, results, and reports through user administration roles and rights
- Securely store data while allowing users to easily retrieve information
- Integrate data management with third-party applications to meet online water quality monitoring (OWQM) system requirements
The solution
The solution
PWD selected Water Information Systems by KISTERS (WISKI) to be implemented as its OWQM data management system to manage:
- Automate data imports from all sources
- Import approximately 3,200 values every 2 minutes
- Perform data validation, computation & aggregation requiring an additional 24 time series per imported value to support the OWQM data demand
- Send alarms / alerts to department staff via text and email based on events generated from both WISKI data evaluation and third-party alarm messages
- Provide secure access to the WISKI API, allowing for the integration of third-party applications
This particular WISKI implementation allows for all sensors to provide operational and communication status as time series data. This information can then be used in conjunction with the water quality values to determine overall data quality for event alarming while maintaining data integrity and security through all applications to the OWQM system.
The benefits
The benefits
PWD’s WISKI implementation has been configured to fully automate its data management processing. Two-minute interval data are imported from the utility’s SCADA system which populates approximately 3,200 parameters. All data are validated in real-time for reporting and serving data to third-party applications.
Prior to using WISKI, PWD was challenged with IT solutions claiming to be able to manage all of the data management requirements for this project.
Switching to WISKI, PWD workers are now able to focus their attention on operational functions while WISKI performs data management and notifies them by SMS or email of any analysis scenarios require their further attention.