Optimisation of Water Services

Anglian Water currently operate a large interconnected water supply system, set across a broad and diverse geographical region. These systems often have complex operations based upon multiple and changing parameters. Further adding to this complexity is a new Strategic Pipeline spanning the length of Anglian Waters network, increasing the ability to proactively manage water resources and improve resilience is currently being constructed. However this creates further complexity across the Water system which requires additional capability enabling Anglian Water to adopt a more holistic approach.

Water utilities are all facing the same challenges; to drive operational efficiency, enhance system wide operations and improve risk management while aiming for frontier performance in strategic outcomes. Currently Anglian Water operate an existing SCADA network (Out of Scope) with significant levels of automation. This market research is looking to identify the complementary systems available to meet these ever-increasing challenges from source to tap. Therefore, Anglian Water will need to further develop our current control philosophies to move to a planned production environment (Production Planning), through the implementation of more advanced software systems within our OT and IT Architecture. This will provide the ability to operate the water system proactively and enable autonomous control, or to respond to meet the changing requirements and challenges placed upon a smart water system.

The sorts of decisions would include the management and optimisation of:

• Abstraction licence control (Water resourcing)
• Production and distribution costs
• Energy efficiency
• Renewable energy sources
• Asset conditioning
• Water quality
• Supply demand balance (Current)
• Supply demand balance (Forecast)
• Maintenance planning (To enable production planning)
• Water storage points
• Incident management (Appropriate response to unplanned water system events)
• Manual scenario planning

There is also consideration in the ability to utilise these solutions to manually assess scenarios to inform planning activities and future investments.