Intelligent Infrastructure Optimizes Stormwater Management - World Water: Stormwater Management

For many decades, the water sector has successfully used real-time control (RTC), an extension of the system operator that serves as
a full-time watchdog to ensure system performance. RTC also detects potential failures before they affect service. Both the water supply and wastewater sectors have broadly employed RTC to increase the efficiency of their operations and, more importantly, to improve the reliability of delivering critical services.
Historically, this powerful tool has been limited to facilities with a high density of engineering processes, namely water and wastewater treatment facilities
or other critical centralized facilities. A single treatment facility typically includes hundreds to thousands of monitoring and control points. Therefore, the capital investment in RTC would provide a near-immediate return for the facility. Early generation RTC generally took the form of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
First-generation SCADA
was implemented at individual, physically connected locations. Improvements in networking protocols enabled the imple­mentation of networked
remote telemetry units (RTUs). Using RTUs, water and wastewater facilities could receive real-time information about conditions outside of the facility's physical boundaries.
While some intractable challenges in water resources management can benefit from remote operational control
and autonomous intelligent operation, others do not fit into the traditional SCADA system design assumptions. Stormwater management is one of these challenging areas. Both grey and green stormwater infrastructure systems are typically relatively low-cost passive systems that
are often highly distributed across wide geographic areas, which creates opportunities for system improvement through successful RTC integration.
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The big picture
One definition of intelligence ismaking a decision in the presentthat provides the widest range ofoptions in the future. In the contextof stormwater management,this type of future-thinkingintelligence could involve usingRTC to prepare infrastructurefor the coming storm regardlessof its size. Predictive, forecastbasedcontrols can act aheadof the storm, empoweringinfrastructure to use its fullcapacity to control the timing andrate of stormwater flows. Usingintegrated precipitation forecastsand distributed site data fromacross a watershed, modern RTCis able to optimize the performanceof stormwater management infrastructure.Better stormwaterinfrastructure performance resultsin improving water quality,reducing CSOs, and maximizingstormwater control capabilityfor every dollar spent.Modern distributed RTC is arobust tool that municipalitiescan use to implement trulyintelligent infrastructure in orderto prepare today’s infrastructureto handle tomorrow’s storms.