It’s been impressive to me the extent to which the hydraulic model can serve as a guide to evolve a utility’s departmental data layers.  The benefits almost come ancillary throughout the hydraulic model project, without a full appreciation for what typically just happened.  That is, the hydraulic model was completed and calibrated as a contemporary planning and operational tool, but along the way, previously antiquated data quality and formats were renovated, updated, refined, and created for sustainable and multiple beneficial uses post-hydraulic model project.

…from once there was a giant, amorphous ASCII text file customer billing data set, came a geocoded meter point file, linked to customer usage and spatially accurate to represent future parcel-level loadings and just-a-few-click syncing capabilities to support future customer data sets.  Coffee-stained pump curves that once loitered the cabinets and halls of utilities are now consolidated, organized, digital, and updated (!) once the hydraulic model was completed.  GIS data sets, once constructed for extensive and well served mapping primarily, evolved into finely tuned machines, built for model performance. 

Engineers once used to completing desktop hand calculations to substantiate local recommendations, are now performing simulations for localized questions, in the same amount of time, while considering more global impacts system-wide.    This, while operators applying years of institutional knowledge in reactionary scenarios, are now downloading their experiences to a database, facilitating discussions with engineers, and exercising their knowledge proactively through the model, to save thousands of operational dollars while ensuring system redundancies, consistently.

These data improvement examples, ranging from specific customer point data, to foundational piping data, and best of all, the institutional knowledge data set of a utility, all speak to the model’s capability, and almost necessity, to improve the utility’s ability to sustain, and through that sustainability, grow a more efficient and better-planned tomorrow. 

Given the importance of our data, and the transformational opportunity brought by the hydraulic model, we would enjoy hearing your personal experiences or software capabilities of data time-travel and how these help support more widespread, long-lasting applications.  

Data time-travel stories might feature:

·         Billing data

·         GIS Distribution or Collection System Data Layers

·         Elevation Data (anyone time travel from USGS Paper Maps to 2-ft GIS Contours?)

·         Pump Curve data

·         SCADA data

·         Engineer and Operator institutional knowledge

The hydraulic model community looks forward to growing from your shared experiences.

Please make sure your data’s hands and feet remain inside the car while in motion.

ps:     more industry stories of data time-travel will be shared at the AWWA Workshop Session topic:  “Distribution System Model Integration – Pulling the Various Data Silos Together (Model – SCADA – GIS – CMMS – CIS), Sunday, June 20^th 2010,  at the AWWA ACE Conference on of 2010 in Chicago.