Safeguarding our most precious resource
Water is one of the world’s most precious resources. Human beings drink about four liters a day alone, and water is critical for both agriculture and industry as well as sustaining life.
Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) aims to be a “trusted water partner for life.” OCWA’s priority is to deliver water and wastewater services for the health and sustainability of communities. The agency treats water and wastewater, and provides other technical services for 750 client facilities in Ontario, Canada, including municipalities, First Nations, and commercial, industrial, government, and institutional clients.
OCWA’s municipal clients range in size from populations as large as 1.5 million in the Region of Peel, to as small as 2,400 in Moose Factory, a community located in Northern Ontario. This broad scope of experience enables the agency to solve any issues that may arise, no matter the size or type of treatment process in the province. As a result, the agency has grown its municipal client base every year over the past 30 years.
When the Canadian government imposed stricter requirements for monitoring water quality after the Walkerton crisis in May 2000, OCWA built a custom remote monitoring system. Remarkably, the homegrown solution met the agency’s needs for more than 20 years. By the 2020s, the agency needed to modernize. OCWA had three goals. One was converting data from various types of equipment in different plants into a standard format. Another was eliminating time-consuming compliance reporting required whenever network disruptions caused gaps in data. And finally, OCWA was interested in expanding its service portfolio to add value for customers.
Going the distance
OCWA met its goals with an industrial IoT solution built on Cisco industrial routers. Applications running on the routers transform each plant’s data into a standard format for compliance and business reporting, making costly custom work a thing of the past – a report written for one facility will work for all facilities. “It is powerful to standardize monitoring this way,” said Ciprian Panfilie, Director of Operational Systems at OCWA. “Instead of having a specialist for each facility, we built teams that provide specialized services to all facilities around the province, optimizing our approach.”
The solution also ensures OCWA is able to meet regulatory requirements and mitigate the risk of network outages that may create data gaps. If the link from a facility to OCWA’s offices is down, the router retains the data on its built-in storage, transferring it to the cloud once connectivity is restored. “We tried dozens of solutions, but only Cisco’s solution worked flawlessly,” Panfilie said.
As for expanding services, OCWA recently added a sophisticated energy management solution to its portfolio. The routers provide a standard network and cybersecurity template for energy management, enabling baselines, forecasts, and real-time energy management. Another area of service development is near real-time asset performance monitoring and predictive maintenance using LORAWAN sensors and gateways.
Looking ahead
Cisco’s industrial IoT solution is up and running in over 165 OCWA-monitored facilities to date and counting. By 2030, the agency expects to deploy the industrial IoT solution in the majority of its remotely monitored facilities and is exploring other long-term opportunities. Pending further pilot testing, some concepts may be running machine learning applications on the Cisco routers to predict and fix issues before they occur, such as out-of-bounds changes in wastewater effluent quality.
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