AWWA WQTC69309

Currently, the Philadelphia Water Department is developing a fast, reliable and largely automated water quality event-detection system with the end-goal of providing actionable data to concerned members within the utility. To ensure that true water quality anomalies can be distinguished from daily and seasonal variations, many factors with the potential to affect water quality must be assessed simultaneously, including the following: pressure/flow in pipes; construction activity; customer complaints; online water quality monitoring data; and, laboratory analysis results. The first step in establishing this system is ensuring that the various data sources can be accessed from a centralized location. Currently, the data from most of these sources is stored in a variety of different databases and is only available within the individual departments where the data resides. The study approach is to establish an Enterprise database where data from all of these sources will be integrated and stored centrally to be available for utility-wide access by trusted users. This solution is simple, cost-effective, and addresses the concerns of various members within the utility by providing the following advantages: a virtual wall to protect the individual systems within each department from accidental or deliberate tampering by the end-user; allows data contributors to filter data and remove operational errors before it can be viewed by a wider audience, thus minimizing false alarms and maintaining departmental boundaries; and, a single enterprise database eliminates concerns about proprietary software integration by converting all of the data to a standard database protocol. Includes figures.