Australian Water Management Review Vol. 1 2014 | Page 48

North South
Interconnection
System Project

O

verlooking the scenic greenery of
Adelaide’s Victoria Square, SA Water’s
Operations Control Centre acts as the
supervisory hub managing the innovative
North South Interconnection System
(NSIS). Driving bulk water transfer systems
across the metropolitan area, from Seacliff in
Adelaide’s south up to Elizabeth in the north,
the NSIS has revolutionised the city’s previ ously
compartmentalised water delivery. Installed as a
means to maximise the benefits of the Adelaide
Desalination Plant, the introduction of the NSIS
replaced what was essentially separate north and
south systems.
“The Desalination Plant was designed to
continuously produce 300 megalitres a day,” Steve
McMichael, SA Water’s Manager of Network &
Production Planning, explains. “Prior to the NSIS
Project the metro water network was roughly split
along the Torrens and there was relatively little feed
back and forth. We were anxious to ensure this
water security measure was able to supply water to
a broader area, so after a long process and heavy
analysis we decided on an interconnected transfer
network using existing infrastructure, supplementary
pipelines and repurposed pipes. What’s unique is
that we can now shift this water all over the place.
There are now a series of zones in the city and we
can play with how water is moved around.”
The introduction of the NSIS has brought with it
a technological overhaul of SA Water’s operating
systems. McMichael motions towards the detailed
flow meter graphics he’s instantly pulled up on the
wall-mounted computer monitors and explains the
practicalities of the Supervisory Control & Data
Acquisition (SCDA) system being utilised by the
Operations Control Centre team.

42 | Australian water man age m e nt re v ie w

“The state-wide network – from Ceduna through
to Mount Gambier and beyond – is monitored by
the SCDA system. It’s a comprehensive state-wide
monitoring control system and we’ve now built a
new section for metro Adelaide. With the SCDA, the
guys here can turn pumps off and on and rearrange
how the water is flowing. The end result is that
it shifts a lot of water from our southern sources
– including the desal plant and Happy Valley
Reservoir - north, which was the fundamental goal
of then NSIS, but also gave us a lot more flexibility
in operating the network.”

has been done on an ad hoc basis by lots of people,
but formalising it like we have is uncommon. Then
there’s the Network Status Display, which is a
sharepoint display about what’s happening in the
network, where the supply is going, the levels of
reservoirs, pump trends, asset information and all
sorts of other information. It was built using a tool
called Amulet, a product from the Scottish firm C3.
All this information existed before in a variety of
places, but the Network Status Display now makes
the data available in a cleaned up format usable by
everyone who needs it.”

Despite a vast number of computer monitors offering
operators up-to-the-minute information on the NSIS
and SA Water assets across the state, the secure
room is altogether unassuming. Operators field phone
calls from staff across the state while monitoring the
network and managing any emerging issues.

Offering a model of every pipe in the metro system,
McMichael outlines the scale of the Network
Operations Model, which has been designed by
the English wing of Colorado infrastructure
specialists Innovyze.

“We had to take a big step in how we ran the Control
Room and the tools we provided operators to manage
all this,” McMichael says. “We created four new
decision support tools, which are software that help
the engineers and operators here run this complicated
thing and provide the information we need.”
McMichael lists off the OCC’s four key software
systems and notes their international importance.
“There are companies in the UK and France pushing
in the same direction, but nobody I’ve seen in
Australia has the decision support tools we are
using. First is the Demand Forecast, which takes
billing data about every connection point, historical
flows, Bureau of Statistics growth forecasts and
Bureau of Meteorology forecasts and builds a
forecast for varying outlooks. Demand forecasting

“It’s enormous – it gives people a way of looking
at what’s happening in the network. It gives live
information about the status of the network, tank
levels and pump status, can be fed with a demand
forecast and then simulates the network’s next seven
days, hour-by-hour. The operators and modellers
can take a copy of the model and see how a burst
on Payneham Road will affect the seven-day
forecast and assess the resulting situation. That
sort of immediate response in a network that has
an enormous amount of pipes is giving a better
indication of how the network will perform at any
one moment.
“Our live hydraulic modelling, which is updated
every hour, is the largest live model in the world and
has pushed the technology a good deal. Innovyze
has had to adjust to some of our requirements
because there’s so much data moving around.”