Over 10-years of Houston's Digital Transformation Journey led by Domain Specialists

The City of Houston (COH) is the largest City in the state of Texas and the fourth largest city in the United States of America. Houston Water owns and operates 39 Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) with a combined permitted capacity of 564 MGD. The wastewater collection system includes approximately 5,900 miles of sewer pipes, 133,000 manholes, and 380 lift stations spread out over 650 square miles to serve about 2.3 million customers. Wastewater Infrastructure Planning (WWIP) Team within Houston Water (HW) is responsible for providing support to Wastewater Operations with long-range Strategic Plans, 1-10 year CIP plans, Strategic Asset Management Planning. The WWIP team consisting of a handful number of in-house hydraulic modelers, engineering planners and analysts along with augmented consulting staff have been utilizing enormous volume of data from various sources, both internal to the city and external. Over the past decade, the WWIP team has developed an array of tools accessible through their in-house platform, the "Advanced Infrastructure Analytics Platform (AIAP)." This platform provides operators and planners with access to the necessary datasets and associated insights for informed decision-making. Analytical results are presented in pre-defined dashboards accessible via web browsers. This capability enables infrastructure analytics, identification of needs, improvement planning, operational and development support, as well as strategic asset management (SAM). The internal data sources in AIAP include GIS database for wastewater infrastructure assets, Work Order Management systems for collection system and treatment facilities, Operational Performance and Regulatory databases, SCADA database that includes operations of the lift stations and wastewater treatment plants, CIP Project Management Database, Field Inspections, Flow meter, Level meter and Rainfall Databases, Hydraulic Capacity Modelling and Planning Databases, Infrastructure Condition Assessment Databases, and more. Additionally, external databases include existing land use and parcel profiles from County Appraisal Districts, population, employment and land use projections from HGAC, Rainfall from HCFCD, soil characteristics from NRCS and NASA, demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics from US Census, regulatory information for contract customers from TCEQ and EPA, flood hazard information from FEMA, stream gage data from USGS, among others.