Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission Automates Wastewater Management Workflow with ArcGIS Notebooks

The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission (PVSC), a regional wastewater district in Northern New Jersey, is one of the largest wastewater treatment plants in the United States. With the critical responsibility of managing approximately 25 percent of the state's wastewater, PVSC serves approximately 1.6 million people across 48 municipalities. Processing an average of 250 million gallons of wastewater per day, PVSC faces the ongoing challenge of efficiently managing considerable fluctuations in wastewater volume to mitigate overflows, particularly during rain events. To address one of these challenges, PVSC successfully implemented a solution involving ArcGIS Notebooks to automate one of their wastewater management routines, yielding notable improvements in efficiency and data quality.

Challenge

PVSC faces numerous challenges in its wastewater management operations. One such challenge is the management of high volumes of wastewater during rain events that can put immense pressure on PVSC’s system capacity.

Tom Laustsen, chief operating officer for the PVSC, explains, “To mitigate overflows, our team has to control plant inflows and adjust sewer regulators to divert excess wastewater flows, when conditions are most critical, in order to protect the plant. This process requires constant monitoring and intervention by operators to ensure maximum throughput and minimum environmental impact.”

Another challenge faced by PVSC is the inspection of regulators after each rain event or overflow. Laustsen says, “Our team is tasked with inspecting each of our regulators to ensure that the system has completely transitioned back to dry weather conditions. This process requires us to manually assign collection system operators to inspect each point and document their observations, thereby increasing their workload and the potential for human error.”

The existing manual process of monitoring conditions and creating work tasks to verify and document the system’s transition back to a non-overflowing state imposed a consistent burden on the PVSC team. PVSC began to explore opportunities to automate their wet weather event management approach.

Solution

To deploy a comprehensive solution, PVSC collaborated with Hazen and Sawyer. Together, these organizations collectively developed and implemented a workflow leveraging the power of ArcGIS Notebooks to create a Python script that automated the monitoring of conditions and the creation of work tasks. ArcGIS Notebooks provides a Jupyter notebook experience optimized for spatial data science and automation of web GIS workflows.

ArcGIS Notebooks allowed PVSC to create an interconnection of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Workforce, and ArcGIS Dashboards, enabling seamless automation across the entire system using Python scripting and the scheduling functionality of ArcGIS Notebooks. The Python script is scheduled to retrieve sensor data every hour to determine if the volume of wastewater flow surpasses the threshold required by PVSC’s Standard Operating Procedures and the position of the regulator gates which control the flow of wastewater into PVSC’s system.

Once the threshold is surpassed and the gates are closed, the rain event has started. The script then triggers a regulator event, generating work orders in ArcGIS Workforce for inspecting each gate and overflow after the event has ended. After inspections, the script updates the records and generates a report.

According to Kenneth Camacho, a senior consultant from Hazen, PVSC needed a tool to seamlessly integrate Python scripts and connect PVSC sensors with ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Workforce. They also required a tool that would facilitate streamlined and transparent collaboration with the client.

“PVSC has a secure and complex infrastructure. To automate wastewater management . . . ArcGIS Notebooks proved to be the perfect solution for such integration,” says Camacho.

Results

The implementation of ArcGIS Notebooks provided PVSC with a robust and efficient solution for their wastewater management operations. By using scheduling functionality to monitor and automate task assignments, PVSC can streamline their operations and improve the accuracy of their data.

The PVSC team no longer needs to manually schedule work tasks to verify and document the system’s transition back to a non-overflowing state. The solution created with Python and ArcGIS Notebooks automatically schedules the collection of data from sensors, updates records at regular intervals, and assigns work tasks to collection system operators. This allows the PVSC team to focus on other critical aspects of their operations.

Laustsen says, "Even though we are still in the adoption stage . . . we already see enormous potential for workload reduction, data accuracy improvement, and long-term cost-saving benefits."

Moving forward, PVSC plans to continue the automation of their operations, leveraging the capabilities of ArcGIS Notebooks to further enhance their wastewater management processes.

Excerpted from Esri.com.