Why water digitalization?
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Why water digitalization?
As water utilities deliberate whether they need to spend money on digitalization, they must reply to one decisive question: why does it?
For us at PUB, the path to digitalization began with the convergence of two expanding themes.
On the one hand, Singapore's growing water demand, rising operating costs of supplying water, looming workforce shortages in the water industry and new concerns such as climate change presented accumulating issues in need of solutions.
On the opposite hand, improvements in virtual and information infrastructures technology have been reworking the worldwide landscape and could provide water utilities with new techniques for improving their productivity and performance in planning, operations, and carrier shipping without critically impacting fees.
In short, we noticed that digitalization held the solutions to a lot of Singapore’s incipient water issues.
By embracing digitalization, we intend to grow to be a smart application that will continue to fulfill its project of imparting true water, reclaiming used water, and taming storm water for humans.
With that in mind, we got here up with four important desires to manual our digitalization efforts: to create cost for the application thru new capabilities, extra green operations, higher painting surroundings and improved purchaser provider.
Importance of Digitalization
Human personnel can utilize virtual structures to make this a reality.
Both are essential for the adventure and to attain the endpoint.
While virtual structures can solve many issues, they must be conducted, controlled and preserved by people with the proper area of expertise.
Digitalization Implementation Phases
Charting a journey
This better-order questioning has additionally enabled us to set a fashionable direction for our transformation whilst leaving room to capitalize on innovative tasks that yield multiple advantages.
As an example, we've located sensors in Singapore’s factories and sewers to locate unlawful discharges.
The statistics are not only used for enforcement actions against delinquent businesses but are also shared with water reclamation treatment plant owners to provide them with more lead time to manage plant operations.
Between 2021 and 2023, we can additionally set up 300,000 smart water meters in homes, business homes, and commercial sites throughout Singapore, as a part of the first section of the Smart Water Meter Programmed.
The smart water meters will provide close to real-time water intake information, changing manual readings taken each month. This endeavor, too, will attain many different dividends for each of our clients and PUB.
With those smart water meters, our customers can track their daily water consumption via a consumer portal, empowering them to be more water-aware and utilize water more wisely.
Our clients can also receive high utilization or capacity leak notifications and restore leaks more quickly to reduce water loss and save money.
At the same time, our officials can break down the information into daily or hourly readings, zones, and sub-zones.
Our officials can find where there may be unaccounted-for water by searching the difference between water given to and utilized by consumers, permitting them to become aware of leaks and restore them sooner.
We also intend to use virtual technology to drive behavioral change toward water conservation, optimize water calls for control, and achieve greater operational savings.
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Furthermore, analyzing demand patterns might help us plan our structures to better suit consumer needs.
Future of Digitalization
As we look ahead, we see an increasing need for digitalization.
As cities strive to meet their residents' water needs while also meeting other goals, such as lowering greenhouse gas emissions, they may need to become more agile and tap into emerging technology.
Concluded digitalization and analyzing information including water consumption patterns, utilities can obtain real-time control of water, avoid over-generating water, make their treatment techniques greater green, and save on resources, along with strength and chemicals.
We are already making advances on all those fronts. Going forward, we will use digitalization to step up the usage of automation to update laborious and repetitive tasks, so that it can unfasten up manpower for better cost-added activities consisting of hassle fixing and growing new ideas.
We are also leveraging synthetic intelligence to aid operations via way of means of decreasing the time taken for decision-making and movements thru analytics and automation.
These techniques will alleviate a looming manpower scarcity precipitated by Singapore’s chronic low birth rate.
Closed-circuit television cameras, sensors, and other surveillance technology will operate as eyes and ears to showcase water treatment plants, requiring our officers to perform fewer physical checks, freeing up time for other activities.
Digitalization may also develop our menu of alternatives to address issues such as flash floods.
In one example in 2019, heavy rain caused flash floods at Craig Road but again.
While the traditional answer might have been to widen the drain at the road or construct a culvert, evaluation of facts gathered all through the downpour and computer modeling pointed to a mile much less disruptive restore building a weir.
Erecting the weir simply took one day, and whilst similarly, extreme rain poured in the region some months later, there have been no flash floods.
With digitalization, we had extra knowledgeable alternatives to pick from and avoid a super quantity of unnecessary paintings.
Integrated Water Management
Ultimately, our purpose is to create a single green water device, wherein all the approaches that reveal water use, accumulate and deal with used water, deal with and bring consuming water and distribute it are optimized at the system level, instead of segregated primarily based totally on feature or branch.
References
[2] Bouwer, H. (2000). Integrated water management: emerging issues and challenges. Agricultural water management, 45(3), 217-228.
[3] Kermode, S., Vietz, G., Tippler, C., Russell, K., Fletcher, T., van der Sterran, M., … & Dean, M. (2020). Urban Streamflow Impact Assessment (USIA): a novel approach for protecting urbanizing waterways and providing the justification for integrated water management. Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 1-11.
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