2006-01-03 - ABB has automated the entire water supply system of the German capital – wells, waterworks, pumping stations, pipelines – and enabled the municipal water authority to reduce operating staff and forecast consumer demand by the hour.
By
Editorial services
The wide area network (WAN) water management system monitors and controls nine waterworks, 900 groundwater wells, seven pumping stations and some 7,700 kilometers of pipeline in three different pressure zones – a vast system that supplies the city’s 3.4 million population with some 550,000 cubic meters of water a day.
|
The ABB network management system controls hundreds of wells and 7,700 kms of pipeline.
The customer, the municipal water authority Berliner Wasserbetriebe, contracted ABB to design a distributed control system that would increase its earnings by reducing staff, optimizing energy consumption, and improving the management and reliability of the water supply system.
The solution provides real-time visualization of the entire network and allows operators to perform online and offline simulation and use historical and real-time data to forecast demand 24 hours in advance.
With this information operators are able to compute the optimal cost supply schedule for the entire network and the predicted demand profile.
Substantial savings
Wells, waterworks and pumping stations are controlled by remote from a central control room to eliminate the need for onsite manning. This has had a significant impact on operating costs, reducing staff from about 160 to 100 and enabling the customer to make substantial savings in annual expenditure.
The quality of the drinking water has also been secured by greater process transparency, made possible by the real-time exchange of data between waterworks.
“We set the target of cutting overheads and creating a water management system that would enable us to predict demand at all plants 24 hours in advance,” says Jens-Uwe Klinger, engineer at Berliner Wasserbetriebe.
“The solution succeeds on all counts and breaks new ground by allowing the water utility of a major city to control the entire water supply system and forecast demand with precision.”