Bangalore Water taps IBM for Big Data analytics

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM announced that Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), which supplies water to nearly 800 square kilometers of the city, is using IBM Big Data and predictive analytics technology to create systems for monitoring and managing increasingly complex water distribution systems.

Bangalore's massive population growth -- from 5.4 million in 2000 to over 10 million and counting today -- has put tremendous strain on the city's water supply and distribution systems.

The main sources of water(Cauvery and Arkavathi rivers) are not just sufficient to meet the water demand in the city to a permissible per capita norms. This leads to a big challenge in equitable distribution of available water across the divisions/subdivisions.

IBM worked closely with BWSSB to create an operational dashboard, based on the IBM Intelligent Operations Center (IOC), which serves as a "command center" for monitoring, administering and managing the city's water supply networks.

The command center will monitor the waterflow in 284 of 784 bulk flow meters in the city and provide a clear, single view of the functioning of all the bulk flow meter, amount of water transmitted by each of them, the amount of water supplied to individual parts of the distribution system, the level of water in each reservoir or tank etc. Data from every working flow meter will be reported on a single dashboard.

The IBM Intelligent Operations Center based solution, developed by the IBM India Software Lab, contains the GIS (Geo Information System) for Bangalore to enable a real-time view of flow meters, along with the ability to zoom in and out, and pan and click on a specific flow meter.

When an asset (GLR or flow meter) is selected, a user can have a view of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as latest flow rate, total flow in 24 hrs and average total flow over past seven days, as well as the geographical location and time of last update.