Yorkshire Water has awarded a framework contract for the provision of telemetry real-time services worth an estimated £6 million in total.

Services to be provided under the framework will fundamentally bridge the gap between IT and operational technology and will provide reliable data connections and translate data into information for the wider business. The framework does not cover the installation of new infrastructure.

Data sources include:

• regional telemetry system
• SCADA
• energy consumption
• sludge transport
• rainfall
• data from 3rd party loggers

Data will be delivered for consumption in the form of raw data e.g. PI Data Link or on visualised displays/dashboards (e.g.PI-Vision). This is in line with the water company’s current strategy of providing situational awareness on a single pane of glass for the control room.

Types of projects the suppliers could potentially be expected to deliver under the contract include:

• visualisation of current data with the use of YWS business logic to illustrate any potential alerts in a timely manner
• data modelling will also be used to take a more predictive/proactive approach,
• smaller projects relating to the control room should be delivered in a standard to allow the growth into a layered situational awareness dashboard (single pane of glass),
• interfaces between systems

Yorkshire Water is currently developing bespoke and nonstandard interfaces to meet the needs of the business. The data is acquired from assets such as water treatment works, waste water treatment works, pumping stations, level monitoring loggers, flow and pressure loggers, sludge tanker operations and energy consumption/generation. All the data must be structured and interfaced to operational databases for business use,

One area the water company is looking at is the use of intelligent alarms to reduce alarm noise - flows and levels are affected by external conditions such as weather and Yorkshire Water does not want to be overloaded with alerts and alarms where a genuine alarm could be missed. Projects will be started which allow data to be fed from existing systems into external analytics where data can be mixed, and only genuine alerts/alarms fed back in.

Projects which require input are limited to:

• internal sewer flooding (using data from addition of small form factor loggers),
• upper quartile performance target waste monitors (using data from addition of additional waste loggers),
• upper quartile performance target acoustic loggers (using data from addition of additional clean loggers),

Bradford-based firm Aqua Consultants and Larsen and Toubro Infotech Ltd in London have both been awarded framework contracts, two of four companies in the bidding for the work.