Smart water management for sustainable municipal operations supplements conventional Water system SCADA

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SmartA Pump Management Systems & Telemetry Solution

Lyon van der Merwe

1. Introduction and Objectives

1.1 Overview

SMARTA Pump Management Systems (SMARTA PMS) & SMARTA Telemetry Solutions are designed to streamline water management, reduce operational costs, and provide a sustainable approach to agricultural, mine, community and municipal water supply challenges.

1.2 Objectives

Key goals include enhancing water conservation, reducing system failures, improving operational efficiency, enhancing maintenance programmes and enabling real-time remote monitoring.

To be more specific, SMARTA PMS’s salient objectives include:

  • Reduce capital and operating expense (Capex & Opex) and simplify network operations

  • Enhance Water Revenue enhancement

  • Improve reliable supply of water to urban, rural & agricultural customer through integrated network monitoring

  • Automation of Ground water supply system (Boreholes)

  • Reduce premature failures of pump systems

  • Water demand management & Water Conservation Management

1.3 Water supply and dewatering challenges’ interlocking nature complicates the issue

The undeniable interlocking of various aspects of water systems often makes it difficult to break the chain of problems, perceived and real.

  • Rising costs & decreasing budgets are opposites pulling on the same budget.

  • Premature pump system failures cost money not budgeted for and often turning into a “black hole in the ground”.

  • The lack of an effective Water Management tool at an affordable price often precludes the right choices to make the issues above visible. While excellent tools for the purposes of managing water systems are available, very few are truly integrated to the extent that it addresses all the needs.

In section 2 the advantages and means of dealing with challenges mentioned above, are addressed by using the SMARTA PMS solution.

1.4 Target Audience

SMARTA PMS are suitable for use by municipalities, water service authorities, commercial buildings, agricultural activities, residential homeowners and rural communities.

Typical systems and products portfolios include

The smart water management system comes standard with smart management system (Telemetry and SCADA system) for monitoring and remote operations and is cost effective starting with a single parameter (tag) installation, expandable to multiple parameter (tags) applications. System cost grows linearly with expansion, never leaving you with an exorbitant start-up cost for small systems, nor painting yourself into a corner with systems that grow in complexity and size.

2. Overcoming challenges in generic SCADA based Water Management Systems (WMS)

2.1 Interlocking Water Supply Challenges

Rising costs and decreasing budgets play a major role when considering inappropriate capital expenditure to deal with the repair/replacement of damaged pumps/motors, emergency and temporary projects and the immediate containment of cost, blurring longer term vision and ultimately significantly impeding project cost savings.

On the other hand, operational costs can spiral out of control due to increased manpower costs (including overtime), travel & fleet costs for frequent site visits to perform manual pumping operations & water levels checks, dependence on specialist staff members that have the experience to deal with “typical site problems” and the ever-present pressure of the elimination of downtime.

High electricity costs are created by issues such as reactive maintenance, the lack of real time water balancing, and the rising operational expenses, typical in municipal water managements often caused by lack of communication.

Referring to Figure 2 there are two main forces at play. Traditionally, the focus is on making sure the wheel spins as fast as possible – depicted by “Fext”, while each subfunction experiences an “internal” optimisation force “Fint”.

  • Projects (Capital Expenditure) – This is the main area of focus when initiating a new project such as a Water Management System. Optimising capital expenditure is done at the cost of increased running cost, information sharing cost and maintenance planning.

  • High Non-Revenue Water Losses and Resultant Financial Impacts – Reducing down-time in this area, being the main driver, often leads to increased maintenance cost, impoverished reporting and information sharing and a lack of conformity.

  • Operations (Running expense) – Often operational expenses are not optimised during the initial Project phase. Note that this does not imply incompetence or ignorance. Managing all facets of such an operation is complex.

  • Manual Operations and High Labour Costs – Disruptive maintenance calls, operational variations, unreported operating conditions and similar interferences add unbudgeted costs to an operation.

  • Finance - how much bang are we getting for our buck? Often the Finance department, focused on maximising Return On Investment, looses sight of the longer-term costs and are ill-informed as well, as these costs are not simple to estimate and need to come from various cost centres.

  • Maintenance planning and prediction – This aspect of an operation is often ‘discarded’ until vital failure/s occur. 

  • Information sharing – Enter information sharing or “Interdepartmental Communication” This is the fundamental backbone of success in any System as complex as a Water Management System. It is also the most overlooked aspect of the above. Reasons for this are many and varied. A summary of why communication is complicated includes:

    • Often left as a later after thought

    • Functional communication mistook for overall systems communication

    • The “languages/words/definitions” used for finance, technical, service, geohydrology etc differ substantially.

    • No central focal point or pivotal responsibility is designed into the WMS.

2.2 SMARTA Pump Management System (PMS) handle the difficulties with WMS

A much more amicable situation can be created if the presence of the “grinding gears” was addressed, almost a case of “oiling the machine with a SMARTA Pump Management System (PMS).
This can be accomplished by addressing the following salient (not so visible) characteristics:

  • Communication – all gears in the machine must mesh and turn in the right (same) direction but how would that happen without communication

  • All departments or business units need to use the same map – before starting!

  • Continually check back on the original objectives to make sure the business plan stays are on track.

  • Speak the same language – whether it’s finance, geohydrology, maintenance, changes in the plan, or total system efficacy.

Many of these crucial aspects are not easily achievable with the given tools available today:

  • The best management strategy (should be in place) does not have access to all the information 24/7

  • The most agile SCADA system (which is a vital part of process and detailed control) does not deliver financial, efficacy (efficiency measured across various disciplines), transparent visibility, 24/7 visibility and all-round visibility of information

  • The most efficient Management by Objective strategy does not have 24/7 objective feedback and is therefore based on qualitative objectives mostly (except financial targets) and not all-round quantitative objectives.

In Figure 3 the essential strength of SMARTA PMS is illustrated by how it interacts with all functions (or selected functions) to collect and deliver information 24/7 transparently and in selected format for all to understand.

2.3 Importance of real-time, long-term monitoring

Real-time data and automation across the organisation prevent prolonged plant downtimes and system failures, reduce costs and improves labour efficiency. To this end SMARTA PMS delivers the following 24/7 feedback summarised in Table 1. Typically, SCADA systems do not report across functions and is usually not set up to cater for interdisciplinary information such as hydrological, electrical, maintenance scheduling, asset tracking and financial data as is the case with a water management system (WMS).
Long-term monitoring often results in extensive data volumes and historian management that can be cumbersome and not practical with the end-result being limited data access, delays in data processing, incorrect information and/or information not available to all departments in a form that is directly useful.

3. The SMARTA Pump Management Systems (PMS) Solution - Description & Benefits

3.1 SCADA & Telemetry Technologies

SMARTA PMS is ideally suited to combine sophisticated SCADA water management systems, used for water extraction, storage, purification and distribution management, combining Internet of Things (IoT) technology and ease of data accessibility to enable the remote operation of water utilities, supporting live data visualization, automated controls and data collection.

3.2 Smarta PMS Capabilities compliment SCADA systems

3.2.1 Projects (Capital Expenditure)
SMARTA PMS is an excellent asset management tool that can be used to monitor asset location, health condition and operational availability. See Figure 4.

3.2.2 Operations (Running expense)
SMARTA PMS monitors the complete water management system (WMS) set of parameters according to SANS 10299-8:2003 requirements with respect to ground water. In addition, electrical parameters are monitored to assess wire-to-water system health, cost and efficacy. This results in direct visibility of the 5-min, hourly, daily, monthly and yearly status of the WMS. See Figure 5.

This information is used to record the specific capacity of a borehole as shown in Figure 6.

All the information collected and available dynamically, leads to reduce operating expense, increased maintenance awareness and participation of all parties involved in the management of a WMS (water management system), making use of the prescribed standards and norms for groundwater resource management for communities.

3.2.3 High Non-Revenue Water Losses and Resultant Financial Impacts
SMARTA is ideally suited for water balance assessments on an ongoing and life 24/7/365 basis, making it possible to identify water loss mechanisms almost immediately, leading to prompt and efficient corrective action, maintenance and/or operational redirection, until failure/s can be corrected.

3.2.4 Manual Operations and High Labour Costs
Significant cost implications can result from manual operation, due to perceived “nuisance tripping, whilst in fact system characteristics may have changed. The borehole operation depicted in Figure 8 is a typical long-term observation that indicates changes in borehole behaviour and that could be missed if long-term data is not actively part of the WMS. This is an example of how SMARTA PMS manages automated operation but warns when proactive action is required to avoid knee-jerk manual operation and intervention for the wrong reasons. While SCADA systems record the necessary data, it is often not easily accessible by operating personnel or the amount of data to be analysed may result in “data fatigue”, causing important trends to be ignored. SMARTA PMS balances “big data” and “useful information”.

3.2.5 Finance - how much bang are you getting for your buck?
To assess the volume of water pumped per kilowatt-hour, SCADA systems need access to both power usage (typically from an energy meter) and flow rate data (from flow sensors), as well as total dynamic head (from pressure and level sensors) and a means of interpreting total dynamic head versus flow rate (total dynamic head [TDH] as a function of flow rate [ΔQ/Δt]). Advanced SCADA systems can aggregate this data to calculate the litres/kWh in real time or across specific timeframes, which is useful for tracking efficiency trends. However, this comes at significant cost, since power analysing equipment is required to achieve this objective, whereas SMARTA PMS inherently collects this information and makes it available.
SMARTA reports on water production cost and gives a per-site indication of a WMS efficacy. See Figure 9. It is possible to monitor longer term trends and to ensure pre-emptive warning signals for rise in water cost which can guide possible root cause analysis, prior to experiencing exorbitant costs.

3.2.6 Maintenance planning and prediction
SCADA systems are good at alerting operators to current issues and logging data, but they aren’t designed to predict future problems or perform complex diagnostics without additional predictive maintenance software. While SCADA can monitor parameters like pump pressure, flow rates, and water levels, identifying issues like impending equipment failure requires advanced analytics that SCADA alone can't provide.
Additionally, conventional SCADA systems do not incorporate pump/motor protection. SMARTA PMS, design for pumping applications, include complete pump/motor protection and management which operates independent of other forms or levels of communication and functions as first order/level protection and management in the interest of pump/motor protection. Figure 10 shows the effect of taking corrective action by reducing flow rate of a pump where specific yield dropped.


SMARTA PMS, logging performance on a continuous long-term basis compliment any SCADA system by making it possible to observe pump wear and provide information that assists in longer term maintenance planning, avoiding complete failure, unnecessary downtime and consequential costs. See Figure 11.

3.2.7 Information sharing – from “Control Room” to “Board Room”
Ultimately, the sharing of information across all disciplines involved in a WMS is the key to operational success and the input to future designs, applications and improvements through lessons learnt. SMARTA PMS makes information available by client design and customisation and on various intelligent device platforms. This can range from the more traditional “Control Room” right up to the “Board Room” and all the layers in-between.
This level of shared communication invariable could lead to asset life management and extension, as well as resource management and protection.


Refer to Figure 13. Any observed field behaviour can be viewed and discussed by all parties involved, leading to prompt and prudent decisions.

4. Application and System Architecture

Depending on the application, the various layers making up the SMARTA PMS are utilized to customize the management system according to the customer’s needs.
This is achieved by integrating system components via the communication network through the SMARTA PMS engine room, based on the controls, automation, management and analysis set-up, with the various stakeholders in the operation. See

  • System Components: Detailed architecture includes borehole systems, pipelines, reservoirs, and booster stations.

  • Communications network

  • Mimic Screens and Customizable User Interface for Real-Time Operation.

  • Functionality for Various Users: Customizable control levels for operators, technicians, and administrators ensure secure access.

5. Water Supply & Demand Management with all system components visible

SMARTA PMS automate pump control (and protection), reservoir level monitoring, system leaks and water balance monitoring, which reduce human intervention, eliminate knee-jerk reaction based on limited information and prevent premature systems failure.
The tracking and analysing of consumption patterns result in signature system behaviour and is used to detect abnormal behaviour.
Real-time power quality monitoring and scheduled pump control help manage energy usage and results in optimized operation with a focus on cost reduction, where possible.
Figure 15 shows how all components in single view aids the complete automation overview to confirm all parameters are in order and behaving as expected by management design.

6. SMARTA PMS enhances conventional SCADA for water management systems

To compare SMARTA PMS with conventional SCADA systems, it is important to consider the following situations and to make decisions accordingly:

  • SMARTA PMS should not be viewed as an alternative to existing SCADA systems, since it serves as an enhancement and in many cases, compliments installed SCADA systems.

  • SMARTA PMS can provide all SCADA functionality if designed into a green system.

  • Complex plant management, such as water purification and grey water cleaning that required specific SCADA control is complimented greatly by using SMARTA PMS to manage the overall water management from source to plant to end-user while using dedicated SCADA managed process systems with which SMARTA PMS integrates.

Refer to the summary comparison between conventional SCADA system approach and the SMARTA PMS offering in the table below:

Submitted by: Dr Lyon van der Merwe 0661095007