Digital Twin Development and Application with Water Utilities’ Perspectives for Smart Water Grid Operation Management

To address the challenges and uncertainties of climate change and ever-greater water stress, water utilities around world have increasingly adopt Smart Water Grid (SWG), in which information and communications technologies (ICT) is integrated with sensors and meters to automate, monitor, and control water transmission and distribution systems, hence ensuring that water is efficiently delivered with good quality and the minimum disruptions. SWG plays a critical role in sustaining economic and social development. PUB Singapore’s National Water Agency has implemented SWG for many years by deploying and maintaining hundreds of monitoring stations across the entire country’s water supply network with around 5500km of underground water pipeline. However, to fully realize the benefits of SWG, the challenges remain to be addressed along with the innovation solutions. In this paper, we will elaborate (1) water utilities’ perspectives for SWG requirements and benefits; (2) the lessons learned for real-time monitoring to enhance planning and network operations and help customers conserve water; (3) the challenges for fully realizing the SWG potentials and benefits; (4) the Digital Twin (DT) as innovative solution for SWG operation management along with enablers and barriers for DT development and deployment; and (5) the case study to demonstrate the near real-time application of DT for SWG anomaly detection and localization by integrating physics-based hydraulic model with the data-driven analytics.

Keywords: smart water grid; digital twins, data analytics, hydraulic simulation, anomaly detection, event localization

Acknowledgements: This research is supported by the Singapore National Research Foundation under its Competitive Research Program (CRP) (Water) and administered by PUB (PUB-1804-0087), Singapore’s National Water Agency.