Evides Waterbedrijf is the second largest water company in the Netherlands, supplying its customers with 150 million m3 of drinking water, and 100 million m3 of industrial water per year. Since 2005 the PI System has been used to store both real-time production data from drinking water and industrial water plants, as well as District Metered Area/DMA data (flow and pressure). Since its introduction, information generated from the PI System has played an important role in the day-to-day operations of production plants. However, a wealth of unexplored knowledge is hidden in the enormous amounts of stored data.
Recent experiences have elucidated the power of data visualization in the interpretation and subsequent use of Big Data. In June 2015 started the research project Geographical Asset Management at Evides (GAMEs) in collaboration with Esri and OSIsoft. The project integrates GIS and real-time operational data with OSIsoft's new PI Integrator for Esri ArcGIS. Since then, GAMEs has been expanded to include more than 50 separate functionalities, using PI System data as well as many other internal and external data sources. This expansion has turned GAMEs into a playground for information processing, which should improve and transform business processes at Evides, and lead to improved customer satisfaction and business returns.
After a mere year, GAMEs has been a resounding success. Logistically, GAMEs is run on its own ArcGIS server, allowing rapid integration of updates, thus permitting more freedom of development without hindering day to day operation. Additionally, GAMEs has greatly enhanced insight into thewater networks. Plotting data against a GIS background allows rapid visual interpretation of data, favoring the human mind over complex algorithms. Integration of different sources of data into GAMEs has improved the efficiency and ease of finding problem areas in the water network, and subsequently dealing with them. Moreover, the ease of use has strongly motivated the search for new data sources, increasing the demand for sensors and data validation.
Data visualization has significantly improved understanding of the water networks. Currently, due to the success of GAMEs, a production version of GAMEs called Serious GAMEs is being developed in order to create a more stable tool to use in daily operations. In the meantime, development of GAMEs will continue.
Speaker
Jan F.X. Urbanus
After receiving his Master’s in Sanitary Engineering in 1987, Jan Urbanus joined the Rotterdam drinking water supplier Evides. Here, he has held various positions including head of Research, Planning and Sales, manager Infra, manager Asset Management, manager ICT and most recently manager of a group of project managers. In this last position Jan also heads the GAMEs project (Geographical Asset Management Evides), in which information from multiple origins are integrated and visualized against an Esri ArcGIS-background using the PI System as a major source of data. Jan’s presentation will concentrate on the GAMEs project, focusing on the power of visualization when analyzing and interpreting multifaceted sources of data, and the practical implications of these techniques.