While technical shifts and issues have the greatest impact on edge computing, corporate reorganizations and new priorities also play a big role in how those technologies are developed and implemented by end-users.
“My group at Actemium-Avanceon works mostly with water and wastewater applications in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and as many of these utilities expand, the larger organizations are buying the smaller municipal operations. They want to coordinate their fleets of lift and pumping stations and other equipment, but they need creative networking and accessibility solutions to access and integrate those smaller systems,” says Brandon DeFanti, principal engineer for controls and water/wastewater at Actemium-Avanceon, a system integrator in Exton, Pa., that’s also a founding and certified member of the Control System Integrators Association (CSIA). “Previously, these smaller systems would use omnidirectional antennas, and bounce signals off of towers to reach centralized hubs and control areas. Their surveys would seek triangulation points and do line-of-sight calculations for radios, but those old methods are phasing out.
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“Now, even though each terminal comes with a monthly fee, cellular is emerging along with Wi-Fi because it’s more reliable and available, even in rural areas. Cellular also covers far more distance, has better signal penetration than Wi-Fi, and its infrastructure doesn’t get knocked out by growing trees or storms like radios and Wi-Fi. Consequently, users are doing site surveys and audits to identify the strongest cellular carrier for their individual needs, such as Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T’s Priority First Net for critical communications. Some users may think they have few options, but this isn’t so because many are available.”
Dealing with distances
Because water/wastewater equipment and operations are often widely distributed, DeFanti reports that Actemium-Avanceon is also getting more involved with using edge computing for data collection and analytics and management, especially using edge-based PCs for monitoring, maintenance, prevention and even some remote-control functions. One solution that combines central hub and remote information is Aveva’s System Platform with Wonderware HMI/SCADA for viewing processes, Historian software for data collection and archiving, and InTouch Edge software for scaling applications, and running without a network while still maintaining local control.
“Edge-based PCs can monitor and enable remote control, but they can also run in island-mode to keep operations running when outside interactions aren’t available, as well as archive their own data, and report later when external connections are restored,” explains DeFanti. “Our water/wastewater clients also have to comply with local department environmental protections (DEP). These include documenting that chlorine dosing is within minimum/maximum levels, meeting pH and turbidity requirements, and usually reporting monthly on each day’s performance. This information is typically gathered by remote terminals that include PLCs for pumps and other distributed equipment, edge-based HMI screens, and other data collection devices that report back to the historian.”
Following the fleet’s information
Actemium-Avanceon works on the edge because its water/wastewater clients have so many remote sites based on equally remote water feeds. Because they’re usually moving water from one source, town or other location to another, they’re also moving data, and gathering, manipulating or converting it to other forms and formats. This makes formerly, nice-to-have data about pump efficiencies and power levels more important than it was before.
“As municipalities and their utility companies get larger, and consolidate and/or privatize, they want to know more about their water/wastewater assets. They want to learn how to make them more efficient due to new rules, equipment that’s reaching end of life, and planned upgrades to 21st-century controls and networking, such as cellular communications, remote data collection, process and analytics,” says DeFanti. “These days, even the smallest water districts managed by one guy and his brother need to access local, county and state data. This is because they’re serving rural communities that are often becoming less rural, and gaining enough people and water-volume requirements that single station pumps aren’t enough.”
These consolidating utilities and expanding communities need more data than traditional water levels and chemical information. They’re comparing influent and clean-water-discharge flows to help identify leaks in water distribution systems.
“We’ve been collecting these types of data for 15-20 years, so we have lots of it, but now we have more of an opportunity to do something more useful with it,” explains DeFanti. “We can begin to answer questions like what happens to the chemical levels when certain events or conditions occur? We can check amps used per run, or monitor power used per gallon of water flow. This lets us design calculations and tools to show us what the data we’ve collected means. We’re also getting heavily into adding additional context from other sources such as labor, financial, weather, and maintenance data and systems. We have a data operations and analytics (DataOps) division at Actemium-Avanceon working on it, and are deep diving on the data to provide operational insight to augment existing regulatory reporting and cost analysis.”
