GIS in Water/Wastewater Treatment Plants

[TimHayes]

I work at a large Wastewater Treatment Plant. We have constructed a Geodatabase for all our Plant's Piping, Valves, Manholes, and other assets (including Electrical and Fiber Optic). Our Plant staff routinely use our ArcGIS Server Map Viewer (constructed in Flex), for example, to locate Piping and Isolation Valves which can be done in a matter of seconds. Whereas before GIS, the staff had to scounge and pile through dozens of drawings to locate what they need which sometimes took hours or days. Thanks to GIS we now know where all our buried utilities are located in a very specific sense instead of the general area. To date we have 78 piping systems, hundreds of miles of piping (above ground, buried, in tunnels, and basements), 1,200 isolation valves, 300 manholes, etc... in our Plant GIS.

Are there other Water or Wastewater Treatment Plants that use GIS? please share your stories/experiences. Why did you choose to use GIS? Why are you not using GIS? What barriers have you or do you expect to encounter? How are you using GIS?

NOTE: This is not GIS for distribution/collection systems, this discussion pertains specifically to GIS inside Water/Wastewater Treatment Plants.

[Anonymous User]

Tim,

I'd like to discuss this in further detail if you have some time. A number of our clients want to take this step, but aren't quite sure how to go about this process.

When you get a chance, send me an e-mail.

Seth, Sr. Account Executive
sjohnstone@esri.com

[Mai_PhuongAnh]

Our company also works in the field of water treatment, we are specialized in water treatment.I am also exploring the application of GIS in water treatment, operation how
Can anyone show me more?
Thank you

[michaelcollins1]

Check this out, the world's first Information Utility.

http://www.ssmic.com/index.cfm

Paul Beach (GISP - Manager - Community Geomatics Centre) gave a talk at the Centre of Geographic Sciences while I was there, sounds like a good place to start.

[ReneRubalcava]

I'd love to hear more about the labor involved in the work you had to do for a project like this.

We plan on doing this with our plants at some point, but we just don't have the staff to process design drawings to GIS, even for our smallest plant.

[Mai_PhuongAnh]

In fact that our company often carry out small projects due to the limited capacity, we now want to explore the application of GIS in the field of water treatment to prepare bidding for larger projects requiring more experience

[TimHayes]

I'd love to hear more about the labor involved in the work you had to do for a project like this.

We plan on doing this with our plants at some point, but we just don't have the staff to process design drawings to GIS, even for our smallest plant.

You state exactly the problem most or all Plants have regarding getting their infrastructure into GIS, let me expand on this, based on my experience in meeting with dozens of Plant staff across the US over the past 4 years.

What are the barriers to Plants in getting their infrastructure into GIS?
- Lack of staff.
- No one qualified to use GIS. Most Plants remain focused on Operations and Maintenance. Some have moved to Asset Management, but without the GIS side.
- Lack of visionary leadership to hire, train, retain GIS staff. Most Plants operate in a very traditional sense where you have Operators, Maintenance Technicians, and a few Engineers only. It is very difficult to change a cultural mindset to accept GIS.
- Lack of time to review/convert their drawings.
- Thinking that Asset Management is GIS; not true. Our Plant's GIS is separate from our Asset Management System. However, we have it linked to several Feature Classes, but not all of them. Our Plant staff routinely use our Flex Map Viewer (that the GIS Team built for free) to view piping maps and valve locations among others. Our CMMS is only accessed for work orders, but many times they just need to see what is where and what it is connected to. This is where GIS comes in to use outside the CMMS. GIS-Asset Management-CMMS are all complementary.


What approach did we take for our Plant?
- Hire dedicated staff, we have a GIS Team of two people. Full-Time. This is all we do. We are under the Maintenance Division and report to the Division Manager. (Note: we do not oversee our Asset Management System or CMMS, this is another group, all we do is GIS)
-As with most GIS professionals, they possess little or no knowledge about Wastewater Treatment Plant Operations. We had to learn from scratch, took us about 2 years to become proficient to the level of a Grade 1 Wastewater Treatment Plant Operator. We were mentored by our Senior Operators and did a lot of walking around and reading. Only then did we feel comfortable in knowing how to apply GIS to a Plant.
- You cannot take the approach of "just scan all the drawings in, convert them to GIS, and you are done", this is a common approach with Distribution/Collection Systems. To build a successful Plant GIS, you must do this, and learn about your Plant by talking to people and walking around. We call this approach "going Plant walkabout". Each one is unique, and a lot of the infrastucture is not in drawings. Expect GIS to be a critical part of the Plant like Operations, Maintenance, SCADA, Engineering, etc..
- You cannot expect to hire a consultant, have them do all your work, then after they walk away, who is going to maintain this massive GIS? At our Plant, we have 62 Feature Classes, 12,000 Records, 10gb of GIS data residing in our GIS; including several in-Plant Hydraulic Models. We make daily changes to the data based on our findings in the field. This is not something that can be maintained by a consultant and then "walked away" from when the work is done.
- Limit the use of consultants, we went through 3 consulting firms who were of limited or no benefit to us. GIS consultants may know their distribution/collection system GIS, but they know little or nothing about Plant GIS. This posed such a problem for us that we made the decision to do all the work ourselves with our GIS Team.

BOTTOM LINE:

- 2 people Full-Time, 4 years and counting. At our Plant, GIS is here to stay. We have achieved a level of data quality now where we are able to move into hydraulic modeling and electrical system modeling.
- Drawing conversion to GIS took 1 person, a full year to complete, 40-50hrs per week.
- We have spent $50,000 on GIS consultants with no plans to spend any more.
- For a GIS person, depending on the size of your Plant, expect at least 1-2 years of learning the various systems and how the Plant operates. It is more than just learning how the water/wastewater is treated. You must learn about the dozens of processes that allow it to reach that point of treatment.
- Expect to get "dirty", we spend 60% of our time outside the office in the field. You cannot be a "desk jockey" or "business casual" type person for this sort of project.
- If you are so inclined to embark on this sort of endeavor, I highly recommend you read "Wastewater Treatment Engineering" by Metcalf & Eddy.
- Finally, expect a huge challenge. I have been in GIS for 20+ years and this is the most complex, challenging, and enjoyable project I have ever embarked upon.

I need to note that our Operators, Maintenance staff, and senior managers all see a tremendous value in adopting GIS. They are very happy with the results and are keen to take advantage of GIS further. According to them, it is well worth the investment.

[JaromHlebasko]

From what I can read, you know your systems inside and out. Would you ever consider sharing your geodatabase schema or data dictionary to provide a relevant example of how you accomplished this mind-boggling task? I am always looking for ways to improve our GIS infrastructure and would love to see a working model.

Thank you for your time!

Jarom

[JoshuaDamron]

Wolsely,
  Your post peaks the interest of a lot of public works & sewer district folks.  The insight you give to the level of dedication required to �??manage a plant right�?� is impressive.  Sounds like you work with a great organization, Many of us find it difficult to change upper managements perspective of GIS from a mapping system to a "how we do our daily work" management system.  I would parrot ramon�??s interest in a geodatabase schema.

Your post is of immediate interest to me as I�??ve just received CAD dwgs for my City�??s shiny new $+30 million wastewater treatment plant/reclamation facility and I am putting together a plan to make the most use of the CAD work.  Up till now our GIS has been entirely focused on distributions/collections for W/SS/SD. Our GIS has effectively mapped everything up to the treatment plants, from there our water & wastewater treatment facilities have consisted of a single named point in the GIS.  Mapping out a treatment plant is a new world to construct and I have the opportunity to do it right.  Of course I have to figure out what that means.  You mention an engineering book as reference, are there any other resources that you utilized in building your GIS model?

You mention that you can't "just take the drawings and stick them in the GIS", I agree entirely.  I have a hard time picking the Plant Operators brains to figure out what functionality the GIS offers that they would use daily to make it more that just a mapping program.  Could you give some insight into what functions you have designed into your GIS to make their daily tasks easier so they buy into it?

Most of us in the GIS world have a hard time moving away from using GIS as a mapping program.  Moving my focus from a broad collections system where everything is either at the surface or underground, I�??m not sure how to approach the many elevations encountered with a treatment facility.  As you know there�??s piping above ground, below ground, in buildings and crisscrossing each other in every way in between (the attachments show some of these issues).  How do you illustrate all of that to keep track of it let alone make it so operations crews can view it and make sense of it?  Do you have different feature classes that you show/hide for different elevations?  Did you somehow create cross section views?  If nothing more I would love to see some screen shots of how you brought all of this together.

Another issue is the level of detail.  Since building GIS for a facility is a very micro view of our infrastructure some people seem to think that it should be shown in greater detail.  How did you decide what level of detail to go into?  When it comes to many things like pumps and blowers, it seems to me that I would draw them simply as a point or polygon.  However at different scales each has its benefits (If I�??m looking at the actual blower room a polygon shows the area/volume of the room taken up vs looking at the whole treatment facility a polygon will disappear and a point makes sense.  In my experience duplicating features between feature classes is not a standard practice. In your experience have you had to store the same structure in two feature classes for the visual aide benefits?  Another aspect of this issue is that Operations is wanting me to draw things with the line work detail like they show on the plans for things like pumps and blowers, which since I have the CAD I can do with only a bit of work but I don't think it is realistic to go into such detail (see attached for examples). 

How did you balance between what attribute data is stored in the GIS vs your asset management system?  Next fiscal year we will be moving to an asset management system and when it comes to some of the nitty gritty structures of a treatment plant I�??m not sure what to expect to be handled by a asset management system vs GIS.  Any insights into this are aprpacieted.

Have you found it worth while to track pipe fittings?

Lots of questions.  Again, any thoughts you would like to share would be greatly appreciated.

-Joshua

[TimHayes]

From what I can read, you know your systems inside and out. Would you ever consider sharing your geodatabase schema or data dictionary to provide a relevant example of how you accomplished this mind-boggling task? I am always looking for ways to improve our GIS infrastructure and would love to see a working model.

Thank you for your time!

Jarom

Yes, I am working with ESRI to get our Data Dictionary/Schema/Data Model posted to their site. I expect to have something posted to the ESRI site within 3 months. We just completed our migration from a File Geodatabase to SQL Server Express 2008 R2. With 10.1, this migration was made a lot less painful.