Rotterdam is working hard to meet its climate goals. For example, the municipality is investing heavily in innovative solutions. One of those innovations is the ‘Pumping Station of the Future’ in Prinsenland. This sewage pumping station was recently renovated from top to bottom and now generates clean and green energy. All aspects of pumping station performance are monitored and optimised in real time via a KPI dashboard created by DWG to a customised design. When you add all those innovations together, the conclusion is inescapable: Rotterdam is once again proving itself to be a leader in innovation and greening.
This is the ‘Pumping Station of the Future’: the good guy in the sewage world
There are more than 1,000 sewage pumping stations in the municipality of Rotterdam. All these stations pump some 60,000,000 ㎥ of waste water to the water treatment plants each year. As you can probably imagine, this requires a lot of energy. Not to mention the amount of CO₂ that is emitted. The Pumping Station of the Future in Prinsenland is a good example of what’s possible: it has fuel-efficient drive systems, smart pumps, sustainable lighting and a green roof equipped with solar panels.
The municipality is also looking to the future with down-to-earth realism: what climate change effects can we expect? More extreme periods of rainfall, heat, drought and flooding are probably likely. Whatever the case, the Prinsenland pumping station is ready for the future and will help us keep Rotterdam’s water management under control.
Wanted: IT specialist with Siemens PCS7 expertise
The Municipality of Rotterdam uses Siemens applications for all its process automation. The Prinsenland pumping station is also controlled via a Siemens product: the PCS7. This application features a process historian that reliably collects and reports data.
The Municipality of Rotterdam wanted to display all data in real time in a KPI dashboard. Meeting this requirement meant developing a new and customised application. The application combines data from the PCS7 system with design data and complex performance calculations.
The municipality found the IT specialist with PSC7 expertise it needed in DWG. A two-in-one deal. And this was not the first time we worked together; we had previously rolled out standard software for the municipality. That software is used to keep all the sewer pumping stations in Rotterdam running.
Completely custom dashboard
We developed a fully customised KPI dashboard for the Municipality of Rotterdam: PRO-INF. It is a web-based dashboard that retrieves data automatically from the control system. This dashboard gives the municipality’s experts easy and convenient access to relevant statistics. They can drill down through that information and perform analyses. Take a look at the screens in PRO-INF and read all about the benefits.
Satisfied customer
“We were keen to start working with dashboards to spot trends as they developed. Data from pumping stations is a good source of information for analysing the city’s performance in respect of water management and opens up optimisation opportunities.”
Jerôme Schepers (Municipality of Rotterdam)
Knowledge sharing = key
Detailed discussion with the municipal pumping station experts was an important aspect of our approach to creating this dashboard. For example, the Water department of the Municipality of Rotterdam gave us a quick course in the world of water management and provided a range of calculations for determining when a pumping station is working properly. Our challenge was to translate this information into a real-time dashboard. DWG colleague Pascal Booden: “We had to bring data together from different sources, with no room for error or data gaps, to make the application work properly. That sounds simple, but it was actually an incredibly complex and extensive task.”
Transition to an increasingly data-driven way of working
The Municipality of Rotterdam intends to roll out PRO-INF to other departments. Jerôme Schepers (Municipality of Rotterdam): “This dashboard is specifically tailored to Rotterdam’s pumping stations, but we believe we can also deploy the application for our bridges by creating a standard version.” In fact, the municipality would like to go even further and sees a future benefit in artificial intelligence. Jerôme: “Data is now often used for an activity after the fact, such as replacing a faulty component. We would like to move towards data-driven predictive maintenance.”
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