DC Water

Edge Computing in Water and Eastewater.

It’s the vital dual service that virtually all residents of any municipality rely on every day — but that hopefully goes unnoticed: drinking water consumption and wastewater disposal. Water utilities are the foundation of any city or town, but for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water), the challenge is magnified by that fact that it services some of the nation’s most important buildings, including the White House, the Capitol, national museums, and other vital federal buildings.

Operating one of the largest water utilities in the country, it’s no surprise that a strong supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is a non-negotiable requirement for DC Water. The agency relies on the AVEVA System Platform for secure, real-time automation, operations, and control of its water pumping stations, storage facilities (tanks and reservoirs), sewage pumping stations, stormwater pumping stations, and fabridams on the Potomac River. The AVEVA implementation spans databases called Galaxy Repositories, two redundant AVEVA Historian instances, two application object servers, and two terminal servers that run AVEVA InTouch HMI for visualization. DC Water operates these applications in three control rooms.

The one thing we absolutely cannot tolerate is a failure in any of our servers. If we’d implemented regular servers and experienced any sort of failure, we would be dealing with downtime — pumps and valves not working, water not reaching our customers. That’s obviously unacceptable.”

Read the Success Story

Key Features and Benefits

• Absolutely 0 unplanned downtime since install in 2015
• Total solution failover time was reduced by 90% from 20 minutes to 2 minutes, resulting in improved service reliability
• Fast access to timely data for KPI analysis and regulatory reporting