IMDS

Modelling SA Water’s

pipelines to optimise

water transfer

Case Study

SA Water

Contact Chris Overton

chris.overton@gtsgroup.com.au

322 Glen Osmond Road, Myrtle Bank S.A. 5064 p. +61 8 7324 5229 e. chris.overton@gtsgroup.com.au w. www.gtsgroup.com.au

Green Technology Services (GTS) was founded in Adelaide, South

Australia to preserve the knowledge and experience of the former

Ericsson Utilities group when it ceased operations in 2011; and to

continue supporting Ericsson’s customers in South Australia.

With an unrivalled knowledge of OSIsoft’s PI platform and decades

of engineering experience, GTS was established with a strong

focus on building long-term relationships and delivering successful

outcomes for our customers.

Today, GTS is Australia’s leading OSIsoft PI specialist, providing

solutions to customers across Australia including APA Group, SA

Water, Melbourne Water, Rio Tinto, Arrium, Energy Australia and

Origin Energy.

Why Choose GTS

We believe the greatest asset we can offer our customers is our

experience, because it is only with the benefit of experience that

the right decisions are made. When it comes to PI there is simply

no other integrator in Australia with our expertise and experience –

we are ‘the PI guys’

Our experience helps us support our customers to develop their

data infrastructure goals from ‘blueprint’ to finished solution. We

understand our customers’ specific business needs but our wealth

of experience means we can also bring to the table our own toolkit

of software enhancements as well as best-practice

recommendations gained over many years of building big data

solutions.

We place a great value on customer relationships; we want to

understand your business and build a partnership with you based

on honesty, reliability and a common sense approach to delivery.

If you’re not happy, we’re not doing it right.

Some of Australia’s leading blue chip companies and major public

sector organisations have put their trust in GTS and as a result,

seek to build strong and lasting relationships. Our customer

retention remains very high.

We’re a small integrator with big solution experience; we have the

agility and flexibility of the boutique integrator, while maintaining

the quality practices of our big organisation background that are

the core of good engineering services.

Company Profile

Founding Partners of GTS

approval and execution using SCADA-side plug-ins developed

by GTS.

Asset Framework

The key to the solution’s configurability lay in OSIsoft’s Asset

Framework (AF). AF is a powerful data infrastructure tool

because it allows a logical, hierarchical structure to be defined

that combines data from any source (such as PI points

interfaced to SCADA, databases or other systems) with

calculations or static data. This is a great way to abstract any

complexity in deriving data from the users.

For the IDMS solution GTS created a model of the pipeline in AF

combining operational data from the PI server with forecast data

contained in SQL Server, preconfigured calculations and

constraints and other asset information manually maintained by

planners to provide different scenarios for operators to use (such

as Summer and Winter models).

A key feature of AF is that Data References can be customised.

These can be developed in .NET allowing complex algorithms to

produce attribute values where there is no suitable built-in

function. For the IDMS solution GTS developed purpose-built

Data References for a variety of functions assisting planners

with developing AF models.

ProcessBook

For the IDMS user interface it was desirable to use OSIsoft’s

ProcessBook given that SA Water staff already had experience

in its use. ProcessBook is a graphic development tool providing

a set of objects designed to integrate with data from a PI

database, AF or other data sources. A key feature of

ProcessBook is the ‘Element Relative Display’ (ERD) which

automatically updates values in a ProcessBook display based

on an AF element selected by the user in a navigation pane.

This is a convenient way to build a single display that can be

used across a number of assets or locations with the same data

structure. For example to build a dashboard for all pump

stations or treatment plants.

Although detailed graphics can be created with the ‘drag-and-

drop’ tools available in ProcessBook an important feature is that

it can also be programmed for more complex functionality. For

the IDMS solution GTS developed extensive code for functions

such as managing system configuration, maintaining forecast

data, interactions between displays, retrieving process status

and logs and ‘publishing’ data to the SCADA system.

Customisations

The ‘number-crunching’ optimisation process is very complex

and therefore time-consuming, taking up to several minutes;

GTS developed a ‘Queue Monitor’ to view and manage

optimisation processes and provide redundancy and load-

balancing between two powerful servers dedicated to running

optimisations.

The result was a solution empowering planners to develop multiple seasonal or environmental scenarios with all the operational, forecast and business rule data necessary to configure a model for optimisation. The

solution created power annual savings in the order of 2% to 5%

A number of bespoke components were required to integrate

the business-side processes with the SCADA side.

GTS developed a number of utilities and iFIX graphics to take pump schedules from the business side, present them for operator review and approval, and execute them using established SCADA processes shared by manual schedule entry screens.

Benefits The result was a solution empowering planners to develop

multiple seasonal or environmental scenarios feeding into a

rich user interface providing operators with all the operational,

forecast and business rule data necessary to configure a model

for optimisation.

The optimised pump schedule could then be passed on to the

SCADA system for human review and approval and then

automatically executed.

A series of time-consuming tasks from planner’s preparing

seasonal ‘rules’ and long-term water transfer targets; to

operator’s preparing pump schedules and manually entering

pump commands into the SCADA system was reduced to a few

minutes work with improved efficiency and reduced risk of

violating constraints.

The solution created power annual savings in the order of 2%

to 5% (variable depending on operational constraints).

Details of the Case

Business Situation

SA Water maintains an extensive pipeline infrastructure

comprising more than AU$13 Billion in assets for the harvesting,

treatment and supply of water to 1.5 million people throughout

South Australia.

South Australia consumes around 220GL of water annually with

about 80% sourced from the River Murray. Energy costs for

pumping water from the river are around $20,000,000 annually.

The high – and rising – cost of energy, coupled with the complex

pipeline-reservoir network and frequent operational constraints

led SA Water to seek a software decision support tool for system

engineers and pipeline operators to:

Create optimized pumping schedules

Reduce energy costs by up to 5%

Provide pipeline models for “what-if” analysis

Leverage the existing OSIsoft PI Operational Data Store

(ODS)

Technical Situation

SA Water had a network of SCADA systems across South

Australia comprising some 150,000 tags and a well-established

Operational Data Store (ODS) using an OSIsoft PI Historian to

aggregate the data from numerous SCADA sites. However the

SCADA and business systems operated on separate networks

and there was limited business visibility of SCADA data.

Bulk water transfers relied heavily on operator experience and

manual scheduling procedures which were time-consuming and

offered very limited optimisation capabilities.

It was desirable to leverage SA Water’s existing investment in the

PI software suite to provide operators with a simple but powerful

tool to generate pumping schedules which could then be

integrated into the SCADA system.

Solution GTS developed a solution that brought together operational data

from SCADA systems, demand forecasts, asset information and

operational constraints. A user interface presented the current

state of tanks and pumps together with expected demand trends

and allowed operators to configure the model using their own

experience.

The model configuration data was combined with thousands of

elements of more static pipeline data and a comprehensive set of

operational constraints and processed through an ‘optimisation

engine’ using EPANET developed by a third-party hydraulic

modelling specialist to produce a detailed pumping schedule.

The resulting schedule could then be reviewed and tailored by

operators before being issued to the SCADA system for final

Key Facts

Customer: SA Water

Budget: AU$3M

Duration: 2 years

Key Facts

GTS Team: Technical Lead, PI Designer, Lead PI Developer, PI Developer

Products Used: OSI PI Universal File Loader, OSI PI Historian, OSI PI Asset Framework, OSI PI Notifications,

OSI PI Advanced Calculation Engine, ASP.Net

Data Flow within the IDMS Solution