Creating Business-wide Efficiencies by Utilising Virtual Tags to Extract Additional Value from SCADA Data
Coliban Water, one of Victoria’s largest rural water providers manage, maintain and operate 35 reservoirs and water storage basins across North-Central Victoria and provides water and wastewater services to rural and urban customers across an area of 16,550 sqkm.
Like most water utilities Coliban Water has for decades amassed vast quantities of big data through their SCADA systems, which, while serving a purpose at the time, are difficult to clean and utilise; slowly becoming redundant over the years.
Ahead of the SCADA Summit 2018 we chat to Dr. Peter Prevos, Manager of Data Science at Coliban Water. In this article Peter chats to us about Coliban Water’s newly developed virtual tag system. These tags extract, analyse and report on data available through SCADA, providing Coliban Water with a clearer contextual backdrop for analysis.
Challenges & Opportunities
[PP1] SCADA systems provide a wealth of operational data about industrial systems. They are designed and optimised to operate assets by collecting data and using this information to help operators make decisions. This data is stored on a server and it eventually becomes ‘dark data’, as it is rarely used again. Data stored on SCADA historians are a valuable source of information to optimise processes. Coliban Water has implemented a data science strategy to maximise the value we can extract from this ‘dark data’ by optimising water treatment processes and managing water resources.
Coliban Water’s data science transformation journey began as a result of a number of challenges, with water quality being key. As Peter Prevos, Manager of Data Science notes; “it was a water quality problem that really kicked off our transformation journey – we wanted to improve how we manage water quality effectively and efficiently.”
"The data tagging software we’ve developed, which integrates seamlessly with our existing legacy systems, facilitates a number of process efficiencies and value-added benefits business-wide."
Peter continues; “analysing data is an important part of making sure you deliver good water quality. So using that as a starting point we developed our data transformation strategy from there.”
Throughout the early stages of the transformation, and through more effective utilisation of data, Coliban Water were able to resolve water quality issues quickly. This approach enabled them to expand the ways in which the masses of data collected by SCADA systems were being utilised in a bid to create greater returns for the organisation.
“Having resolved the key issues of water quality, we started to expand what we were doing with our collected data to try to solve other challenges. We’re now shifting focus to look at analysing customer data and the value we can extract from that. We have a number of data sources, that had been amassing for years, that nobody ever really looked at, so we wanted to take that data, provide some tangible insights and use these insights to help make decisions that will benefit the overall business,” says Peter.
Read More
Download the full article with Peter to read more about:
- How Coliban Water’s SCADA and Data transformation journey began
- How ‘Virtual Tags’ offer a clearer contextual backdrop for data analysis and effective operation of SCADA systems
- How this Data Tagging software integrates seamlessly with Coliban Water’s existing legacy systems resulting to process efficiencies
Learn More
Join Peter, along with 15 other SCADA and cyber security experts from the likes of Shell QGC, Sydney Water, SA Power Networks, Snowy Hydro Ltd. and Rio Tinto at the SCADA Summit 2018 held in Melbourne on the on the 30th of May – 1st of June.