Energy and Utilities

Meeting stricter compliance requirements

Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA), a Crown Agency of the Province of Ontario, is Canada’s largest operator of water and wastewater facilities. OCWA is continuously innovating to offer safe, reliable, and cost-effective clean water, wastewater, and technical services, including process and energy optimization, capital project planning and management, asset management, innovation, and alternative delivery and SCADA solutions. The agency’s clients include municipalities, businesses, institutions, and First Nations communities. Ciprian Panfilie, OCWA’s Director of Operational Systems, notes that “operational efficiency is crucial to fulfill our contractual obligations.”

Back in 2000, OCWA started remotely monitoring water quality across 750 facilities. A precursor to today’s industrial internet of things (IIoT), the solution met the agency’s needs for more than 20 years. “Over time, operations and reporting requirements became more complex, and we needed more capabilities,” Panfilie says. There are strict regulatory compliance requirements when designing a water treatment facility, however, each site and facility requires unique considerations, based on a range of site characteristics, raw water quality, and design decisions.

OCWA has had to adapt to these increasingly stringent compliance regulations. “For example, data gaps due to lost connectivity are now reportable events, which required field staff to manually provide the information,” Panfilie explains. Aspects like operational technologies, plant capacity, and water quality vary. The need to operate hundreds of distinct facilities cost-effectively provided an opportunity for further optimization of the agency’s approaches and strategy, including technology enablement and follow-through. This involved considerations like determining whether to dispatch a technician to reset a router or whether a more optimized approach could be taken.

Bringing connectivity to remote areas

Cisco industrial routing appeared on OCWA’s radar in 2016, when a First Nations community requested a remote monitoring solution for its self-managed water and wastewater facilities. The solution needed to be cloud-based, virtually maintenance free, and integrate seamlessly with local systems. Cisco routers fit the bill and solved a connectivity roadblock: With both cellular and wireless LAN connectivity the routers got signal in areas with no internet and spotty cellular service. “We couldn’t use our phones,” Panfilie says, “but with the use of good antennas these routers still work.”

Powering operational efficiency with edge computing

Panfilie and his team quickly realized that the same Cisco solution would simplify operations. “We extensively tested Cisco industrial routers in our environment,” he says. “Nothing else out there matches their versatility and reliability. We like the built-in compute resources, which let us run powerful applications at the edge. With the modular design we can order exactly the capabilities we need and adapt to new technologies as we need them.”

OCWA’s lean business model depends on standardized operations across all client facilities. The agency runs facility-management applications right on the routers, taking advantage of the routers’ built-in Cisco IOx application environment. The applications collect process, compliance, and other types of information from each facility and aggregates the data into standardized business and compliance reporting. The edge compute capabilities also drive new services, such as sophisticated energy management. The energy-related applications fully define the facility’s data structures, communication, and cybersecurity in a single template. "Adding this service to a facility is as easy as connecting the router panel to the facility’s smart meters,” says Panfilie. In the works are several machine learning applications for the Cisco routers such as forecasting phosphorus levels in wastewater effluent, chemical consumption, and predictive maintenance for high-value assets.

Panfilie says that even less conspicuous features of the routers proved to be valuable such as the ability to implement graceful automatic reboot in case of communication failure or flatlining data. Technicians can also reset and reconfigure the Cisco routers remotely. These features alone almost eliminated the need for travel to remote locations. And thanks to 100 GB of built-in storage, OCWA can back up compliance data at the edge, eliminating data gaps when the cloud connection is lost. “Before, lost data required manual reporting,” Panfilie says. “Since we installed the Cisco routers, compliance issues due to network failure dropped to zero.”

Panfilie and his team designed the IIoT solution to scale easily. “Cisco routers are easy to deploy, work immediately, and require little maintenance,” Panfilie says. “Standardizing with the industrial IoT solution is powerful. Instead of having a specialist for each facility, a relatively small team can provide specialized services for any of our facilities in Ontario.

A look into the future

Some 4.5 million people drink OCWA-treated water every day. With Cisco industrial routers, the agency supports its clients to provide clean and safe water at affordable prices.

OCWA is preparing to upgrade to Cisco Catalyst IR1835 Rugged Routers. By 2030, the agency expects to deploy the industrial IoT solution in the majority of its remotely monitored facilities.