AWWA IMTECH57889

As water utilities continue to install more and more on-line instrumentation and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to improve monitoring and control of their plants and to meet regulatory requirements, the volume of data being generated from these systems is increasing rapidly. Indeed, one can argue that plant data is the fastest growing asset that utilities have today but not necessarily the most utilized. To derive a higher level of benefit from plant data, both it's availability to users (experts) and manipulation needs to increase so that the overall intelligence or knowledge about the plant increases. This paper discusses the concept of plant intelligence, how it can be implemented, and why utilities should invest and support it to gain performance benefits. Examples of how plant data can be made more useful by integrating it with readily available browser-based software tools to conduct additional analysis and what-if scenarios is also illustrated. This includes development of operator log book interfaces, on-line analyzer performance monitoring, and executing custom programs such as log-removal, demand forecasts and plant process models in real-time. Includes 3 references, figures.