Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Intelligent Urban Water Supply Testbed
This article gathers information from the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC) Intelligent Urban
Water Supply Testbed. The information and insights described in the following article were
captured in an interview conducted by Joseph Fontaine, Vice President, Testbed Programs at IIC
with Dr. Shi-Wan Lin, CEO and Founder of Thingswise, LLC. Shi-Wan is an IoT Technologist who
serves as Co-Chair of the IIC Technology Working Group and the Architecture Task Group.
TESTBED PROFILE
improving water supply management. WPG
has been thinking of ways to adopt industrial
internet technologies in the water supply
sector, making them scalable and at low
cost, so that it can benefit water supply
management for a large number of cities. In
doing so, they look to transform their
business model from a conventional
equipment manufacturer to an intelligent
water supply service provider as well.
The Intelligent Urban Water Supply Testbed
is about building an intelligent water supply
management system. Obviously, water has
been an important element in our lives and
it has become an increasingly scarce
resource due to the growth of populations
and the over-usage of natural resources. The
challenges in water supply are aggravated by
the lack of visibility into water supply
operations including the equipment’s
operational state, if they are running
normally and how well they are running.
As a main category of water supply
equipment, water pumps are sophisticated
industrial automation systems controlled by
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs).
However, once installed, they often operate
independently without connectivity to some
centralized management system. If a pump
fails, someone on the property would make
a call to the water supply company, or to the
manufacturer before technicians can be
dispatched to repair it. This reactive process
tends to have a long turnaround time leading
to a longer period of service outage.
Furthermore, repairs after failures are often
more costly. With the industrial internet,
connecting the equipment or sensors to
remotely collect data from them, and
applying analysis to the data to monitor and
detect early signs of failure, may greatly
improve this process and offer other
improvement, e.g. in energy efficiency and
Water quality is undoubtedly of great
importance. However, visibility into the
water quality is often lacking in various
locations of the water supply pipeline
network. Energy is another issue. With the
rapid growth in the urban settings in China in
the past 30 to 40 years, a great number of
high-rise buildings have been built. To supply
water to these buildings, large water
pressurized pumps are installed in these
buildings. These water pumps consume
substantial energy. Because of lack of
visibility, it is often not known whether their
energy use is efficient.
WPG is a leading water supply manufacturer
in China and among the very first members
of the IIC. They recognized early that the
industrial internet offers great potential for
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November 2017