Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Intelligent Urban Water Supply Testbed
and clearly this is highly inefficient. WPG’s
goal is, instead of each water supply
company building such a system – one by
one, on their own, re-inventing the wheel,
one after another – to establish these
technological capabilities in the cloud and
offer these capabilities to the water supply
companies as a service.
in China.
There are two approaches to connect to
these pumps: one is directly connecting to
these pumps by deploying IoT gateways.
Secondly, some of the water supply
management companies have built their
SCADA systems prior to this testbed. In this
case, the testbed bridges the SCADA systems
into the testbed systems.
In this way, WPG can lower costs because
they are providing these technical
capabilities in the cloud at scale, making it
more affordable for the water supply
companies to leverage and benefit from the
latest technologies. With this, WPG seeks to
transform themselves from a traditional
manufacturer to a service provider by
working very closely with the water supply
companies to deliver value to them as
partners.
Much of the hard work remains in collecting
enough quality data and building analytics
models so that models can be applied back
to the runtime environment to capture
meaningful patterns in near real-time to
achieve the technical goals outlined above.
IIC E COSYSTEM
The Intelligent Urban Water Supply Testbed
participants came together in the ecosystem
fostered by the IIC. WPG came to Boston in
2014, wanting to learn about and get
involved in the industrial internet. Engaging
with the newly formed IIC, they found these
ideas very important in solving challenges
faced by companies in the water supply
sector. It is within the IIC ecosystem that the
current members of the testbed
participating companies met, engaged and
planned out the testbed.
P LANNING
Initially, from the technology perspective,
the testbed established its service-in-a-cloud
platform, so this service can be accessible
across the country. Then they deployed their
software and provided data processing,
analytics and business applications in the
platform. During the initial experimentation,
a number of gateways were installed
connecting to water pumps in customer
premises and data was collected from these
gateways to validate the system.
WPG has a large business stake in making
this successful. They bring the domain
knowledge, business use cases and customer
relationships. They know details about their
equipment, the behavior of the equipment
and how the behavior is reflected in the data
that are collected.
WPG has continued to engage the potential
customers – the water supply companies –
and it turns out that many of them are very
interested in these services. So at this time
of this interview, there are currently about
2,500 water pumps connected to the
testbed in approximately 100 municipalities
Thingswise offers a streaming analytics
platform that adapts and innovates the
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November 2017