Leveraging SCADA Data to Enhance Collection System Model Reliability

The City of Columbus (Ohio) has invested in the development of a detailed and powerful computer model of its complex wastewater collection system, and in the concurrent development of a sophisticated Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA) system for control of the key elements within the collection system. The SCADA system also provides large datasets with fine temporal resolution that can now be captured, stored and retrieved to document the activation of various control elements (gates, pumps, etc.). These datasets are extremely useful to the process of building, calibrating and validating the system models that are now capable of accurately simulating complex wastewater collection system operations such as those in Columbus. This paper describes how the recent advances in both modeling and SCADA technology can together support increasingly powerful and reliable models of complex collection systems.