Realisation of smart system with automated analyses for the management of Rotterdam pumping stations

Water… It falls from the sky, it flows out of the tap and it pools in the great seas and oceans of the world. When you combine the latter type of water with Rotterdam, you soon gravitate to the port. In fact, Europe’s largest port is located on the coastline of our little country. The Water department of the Municipality of Rotterdam is responsible for strategic and operational management of – you’ve guessed it – water. Because that water has a will of its own. After all, it naturally flows from high areas to low areas, which is sometimes inconvenient. Pumping stations help us ensure that water levels in a specific area are maintained at the desired level. To summarise: a pumping station is basically a large pump that allows us to move water from a lower to a higher level.  

The municipality of Rotterdam engaged DWG to help it manage the region’s pumping stations (and thus the water). The functional status of the pumping stations is currently recorded based on a variety of different readings. Verification of the design characteristics is then done by hand. The municipality asked DWG to come up with a smart system that could support this approach through (partially) automated analysis. DWG is not afraid of deep water, so we jumped at the chance! 

It is important to us that a system we develop is suitable and manageable for the people who will actually work with it. Because battling water is not our speciality – we like to leave that to the experts. We worked closely with the end users to create a system that perfectly matched the way the operational departments work.

We designed this system on an iterative development path and it displays all relevant information at a glance. Obviously, the quality of the source data is still the highest priority, so we focused on robustness in respect of this quality and traceability in relation to actions and decisions. And DWG wouldn’t be DWG if we didn’t take into account the ongoing evolution of the underlying infrastructure. So this aspect was also extensively considered in the design of the system.

So did we succeed? There is no question about that. We developed a user interface that can be accessed easily via your default browser. You do not need to install any special, local software to use the program. Because there is already more than enough special software of this type in our opinion. We used de facto industry standards such as C#, .NET, CSS, HTLM5 and MVC. Keep that water coming, the municipality of Rotterdam is ready for it!