In 2016 Urban Water Solutions was engaged by Melbourne Water to undertake a pilot study to assess the application of the Innovyze software, IWLive, for the development of an Operational Model of the Winneke water transfer system.  Operational Models provide network operators with a sophisticated tool for assessing the response of the system to a range of events and to develop solutions to mitigate or prevent network issues.

The Operational Model developed during the pilot study applied the current control settings and future 7-day forecasts of offtake flows from the Melbourne Water transfer network, together with customer usage profiles, to run hydraulic simulations in real-time and forecast future network performance.

A real-time link was established between the SCADA system settings for the two pumping stations and inlet valves at the four service reservoirs and the Operational Model.  The IWLive model was set up to extract both control and monitoring data feeds from a PI Historian database which stores data recorded by Melbourne Water’s SCADA system.  The recorded flow, pressure and level monitoring data was used to verify the simulation results and to “train” and verify the short-term demand forecasting software, DemandWatch.

Following successful completion of the Winneke pilot study, Melbourne Water made the decision to proceed with a staged implementation of operational modelling across its entire water transfer system.