How Miami-Dade Water gets smarter with the Internet of Things

By Microsoft in Business Team

October 30, 2017

Tags
Government

Focus on: Empower Employees, Optimize Operations, Engage Customers

There’s not much like Miami-Dade’s water. With almost three million residents, Miami-Dade is the seventh most populated county in the United States and a popular one for tourists. When visitors and residents can’t make it to the beach, the Miami-Dade County Water and Sewer Department (WASD) brings the water to them through more than 6,000 miles of pipes.

But with such a wide-ranging infrastructure comes the challenge of maintaining the system to protect residents and the environment from leaks and spills. With the Internet of Things (IoT), a cloud database, and thousands of sensors gathering data such as water pressure, flow rates, and rainfall, Miami-Dade’s Water and Sewer Department (WASD) is developing a smarter way to manage and supply this precious resource and manage the wastewater serving over 400,000 households across the County.

Modernizing an aging infrastructure

Miami-Dade sits roughly one meter above sea level. While that’s excellent for bike cruises and beach life, for the water department that means relying on more than 1,000 separate sewer pump stations (many with more than 2 pumps) to push residents’ wastewater through more than 4,000 miles of infrastructure—some sections of which are over 90 years old. That’s a lot of delicate pieces working in tandem to help flush a toilet, and those parts create massive amounts of data.

The Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System, better known as SCADA, is a control system architecture that Miami-Dade Water relies on to operate and collect data from their water pipes, sewer lines, meters, and pumps. For the past 22 years, SCADA has collected millions of rows of data every day—flow rates, pressure, usage—to provide data for engineers, operations staff, maintenance staff, and regulatory reporting. These metrics equipped Miami-Dade Water to measure usage, identify trends and defects, predict problems, and record work orders and maintenance, but for years, no one really knew what to do with those statistics until after a problem surfaced. Instead, they found themselves trying to figure out how to store, manage, and analyze that constantly-growing mountain of information.

Limited to spreadsheets, SQL tools, and basic reports, SCADA users lacked any significant means of visualizing for their information, and the existing tools could only manage so much data at a time—to the point that it took a team of WASD engineers upwards of days, weeks, or months to process data from a single pump station. For WASD to make significant improvements, they needed a way to look at more than 1,000 pump stations and every mile of pipe together. Without a holistic look at their system, engineers and analysts were limited to analyzing small individual scenarios.

In 2013, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tasked Miami-Dade with managing and operating their sewer system more effectively. Their aging infrastructure was failing, and the results were spilling into residents’ homes and out into the local ecosystem. The EPA now expects reports demonstrating WASD’s infrastructure investments, along with maintenance, operator, and management dashboards that demonstrated their improvement. Visualizations that, given the pace of WASD’s data and the condition of their infrastructure, felt nearly impossible to create. The WASD’s Information Technology team proposed a technology solution to solve the agency’s data problem, meet the EPA requirements, and rebuild their infrastructure in an IoT solution built on Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Power BI.

“There’s so much data, and it’s so voluminous that with the current tools, you can’t see it. The answer might be there but you can’t see it,” Andrew, IT Manager, says. “We’re looking at a platform that can process it and visualize it more quickly and accurately.”

Crunching the numbers in seconds, not days

This new platform equips the WASD’s Information Technology team with the scalability, insight, and power to process data in seconds rather than days. Andrew explains, “The engineers would get an extract of three years’ worth of data of one metric of that one pump station—because that’s all a spreadsheet can handle. But now we can crunch data from more than 1,000 pump stations from the past 22 years in a matter of seconds.”

Since adopting their cloud solution, WASD has loaded over fifteen billion rows of SCADA historical data into their Azure SQL Data Warehouse and are adding over four million more every day. This not only equips WASD to better analyze and act on its existing infrastructure but will allow for better insight which can help the planners, operations and maintenance staff identify and respond. If the pumps are overworked, this can be quickly identified for a maintenance crew to respond.

That’s the beauty of near real-time data—it will allow WASD to proactively serve Miami-Dade County residents instead of responding to issues after the fact. WASD employees can address those needs much more effectively and with intention instead of reaction.

“When you look at the data, it paints a better picture and tells a richer story about what to do,” Andrew says. “That’s how I see IoT being able to help the county analyze the data it has and likely make better decisions about planning and operations.”

Improving service and reducing costs with the Internet of Things

With Azure SQL Data Warehouse, WASD staff can extract data from specific years and better visualize those metrics to conduct a proper analysis over time. Visualizations can include charts, graphs, GIS, and even tabular data extracts. Data can be stored as necessary to better identify key details, and planners and engineers can make data-driven decisions in near real time instead of acting based on outdated data.

“The new platform and its benefits were presented to planning engineers a few weeks ago, and they were amazed and excited as well as looking forward to use technology to solve their everyday problems,” Andrew says.

But it’s not just improving WASD’s analytics—it’s saving them money. This new solution provides a more efficient use of WASD’s annual budget and better spends tax payers’ dollars. Now, the WASD’s Information Technology team and WASD staff can easily pull data from their entire network to create not only a holistic view of their infrastructure but a more accurate profile of each pump station, its maintenance history, and projected future performance.

This Azure solution could have wide implications across Miami-Dade County. With help from the Microsoft team, WASD created a utility resource that is scalable and easily transferable for use by other government agencies. Other agencies can apply a similar IoT solution to the predictive and preventative maintenance of its operations.

“WASD has lots of data, but until now they didn’t have the platform to process large amounts of data this quickly. And when you can, I think you’re able to ask the data different questions that you couldn’t do before, and if the answer is in the data, it can be surfaced,” he says.

Every day, WASD’s Information Technology team working with the business users are asking those questions to improve the lives and ecosystems of Miami-Dade residents. Together with their new Microsoft solution, they’re finding answers and reshaping the future of how governments use data and technology to better serve citizens.