Published: Jul 29, 2022

North East Water digital twin

North East Water is a water utility company that provides water and sewage services to an estimated population of 110,000 people in 39 towns in North-East Victoria across an area of 20,000 square kilometres. The service delivery area is bound by Corryong, Yarrawonga, Benalla and Dartmouth.

North East Water engaged Arq Group (ARQ; now part of NCS Australia¹), to solve the challenges they had been facing with their water networks sewer pumps operational efficiency through a custom digital twin solution.

NCS Australia has worked with North East Water to understand the key challenges they were facing with their sewer pumps operational efficiency.

Summary of the key challenges:

Agility Access

North East Water were looking to collaborate the existing asset management system to the cloud, to enable their front-line engineers to check the sewer pumps status from mobile devices and determine in advance where and when maintenance of individual pumps would be required.

Security

As a utility organisation aligned with the public sector, safely storing and transferring sensitive data is a key priority for North East Water. North East Water wanted to have their new cloud-based system running upon the existing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) infrastructure so that the system integrity would be maintained and security compliant. 

Balance Workload

In the water utility industry, it can be challenging to proactively plan when to inspect pumps without any real time information on the pumps conditions. North East Water were facing this challenge and were only aware of issues with their sewer pumps after they had occurred. This resulted in the operation team being called out at all different hours to locate the problem and fix it at soon as possible. A team member from North East Water Wangaratta Operation stated “Sometimes I get called to check a pump, 10 minutes before my shift ends”. According to historic data the situation can sometimes be a lot worse with one of the sewer pumps breaking at 4am on Saturday.

NCS Australia has designed and worked with North East Water to provide an AWS based hybrid digital twin platform which will improve their water networks operational efficiency.

The digital twin platform gets data from the existing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data lake and brings the real-time data feed online in a safe and effective approach. The digital twin solution works closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platform, providing greater portability and accessibility by providing users access to the system anywhere, and on any device (below is an example of the digital twin platform design).
 

The core AWS components utilised in North East Water’s hybrid digital twin solution were:

• AWS IoT TwinMaker
• AWS IoT Event
• AWS IoT SiteWise
• Grafana

Through integrating machine learning into the digital twin system design, North East Water has tested the accuracy for advanced warnings of sewer pump failures, which will help them eliminate approximately 16 out-of-business-hour pump inspections and repairs per pump per year. By deploying the machine learning service on-premises, front-line engineers will be able to access the up-to-date asset status insights and the next best action, which will help them find and fix issues before they happen.

Through the partnership with NCS Australia, North East Water is now able to transfer and analyse sensitive data safely and effectively with their cloud-based digital twin system. This has enabled them to locate pump issues underground before they happen and update the asset inspection planning approach from an experience-driven to data-driven approach. This data driven approach significantly improves North East Water’s operational and resource efficiency and will help North East Water to reduce operating costs over time.

1. At NCS Australia, we’ve brought together several technology services businesses to better serve our customers. Further to the acquisition of Arq Group (ARQ) in 2022, we are renaming Arq Group Enterprise Pty Ltd to NCS AU Pty Ltd to become our operating and customer-facing entity as part of our integration.