Like many other industries, the water and wastewater industry is going through a period of change. The need to improve energy consumption, stretch capital budgets, maximize return on investment, and meet the demands of customers is high on the agenda.
Organizations typically waste significant amounts of time and money attempting to retrieve and recreate existing data. The true value of moving towards a system to improve operational performance of existing assets in water and wastewater infrastructure is being increasingly recognized by owner-operators seeking to maximize control and enhance decision-making capabilities with predictive analytics.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has the propensity, by its very nature, to overwhelm operations and maintenance professionals with vast amounts of data continuously imposed through real-time Big Data streaming from sensors and other inputs of operation technology (OT). Combining this with historical information technology (IT) data, found in tabular databases, librarians and transactional forms, to provide actionable outcomes is a significant challenge.
Today’s professionals can no longer react to emergencies and unplanned events without access to operational and asset information. As such, operational analytics is an emerging, industry-recognized business process that focuses on improving infrastructure asset performance with the power of sophisticated analytics.
The New ‘Must-Have’ System
By connecting the “as-operated” performance of assets and having it compare to the “as-designed” performance, it can be combinatorically analyzed with burgeoning real-time data leveraged with IIoT, Big Data, historical data, and engineering data to improve operational efficiencies with predictive techniques. The predictive and prescriptive nature found with machine learning can be the ultimate decision-support tool to identify critical issues in a timely manner, improving safety and reliability, but also optimizing such scenarios for future forecasting. In this new environment, digital engineering models are integrally connected to the physical asset. This allows the assets new levels of connectivity and intelligence that will allow an evolutionary path from predictive methods to prescriptive optimization, and ultimately to autonomous process of operations.
Bentley Systems is now ideally placed to bridge the gap between IT, OT and engineering technology (ET) with the acquisition of the Amulet from C3global for predictive and prescriptive analytics that delivers operational analytics systems. AssetWise Amulet offers unique value in applying predictive and prescriptive analytics that are easily configurable at industrial scale to leverage just-in-time data for improved operational efficiencies. By discovering and communicating meaningful patterns in and across data, the landscape for asset performance management is shifting and organizational strategy will depend on systems that offer decision support for operations and maintenance.
Bentley Systems is exhibiting at AWWA’s ACE16 expo in Booth 2119.
