IIC Journal of Innovation 6th Edition | Page 31

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 - 30 - November 2017