DC Water serves more than 700,000 residents and 21.3 million annual visitors in the District of Columbia with retail water and wastewater service. With a total service area of approximately 725 square miles, DC Water also treats wastewater for approximately 1.6 million people including neighboring jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia. On average DC Water delivers 92 MGD of drinking water through 1,300 miles of interconnected pipes, four pumping stations, five reservoirs, three water tanks, 43,860 valves, and 9,510 fire hydrants.
To operate and maintain this vast and complex network of water and wastewater infrastructure, DC Water utilizes an array of digital systems including SCADA, CMMS, AMR, GIS, an array of IoT sensors and Hydraulic Models. While these systems serve operational, engineering, and customer service functions, the data from these systems tend to serve specific needs and objectives; and stored in separate databases. In 2020, DC Water began a journey to implement a Water Infrastructure Digital Twin that would enable DC Water with greater operational insights and enables employee across the enterprise with clear and near real-time system operational actionable insight.
In this presentation, DC Water will demonstrate the implementation steps from a utility perspective and will cover challenges and considerations faced during the successful implementation of such Digital Twin. This ranged from data security, digital integration of data across various platforms as well as required internal stakeholders’ participation and support. DC Water will also share the following use cases achieved using the implemented Water Infrastructure Digital Twin such as sensor anomaly detection using machine learning, pump operational performance dashboards, perpetual simulations using a real time network model, ad hoc operational event simulation capabilities that allow operators to test various operational scenarios in near real time including pipe breaks, pump station shutdowns, and fire flow events.
