DigiDrick Digital solutions for monitoring and control of drinking water plants

Purpose and goal

The goal of DigiDrick is to develop improved digital decision and operating support systems for drinking water treatment plants. With improved support systems the plants will strengthen their ability to deal with disturbances in the short term and to handle large changes in the long term. Thereby the organizations will improve their risk minimization and stand stronger against the industry’s future challenges. We want to meet the need of the industry to maximize the use of their control systems by improving operating support and refining information through decision support systems.

Expected results and effects

DigiDrick has shown that the drinking water treatment plants today lack (1) possibilities to combine different data sources, (2) visualization of data as a basis for decisions, (3) the ability to download process data in a safe procedure for long-term evaluation, (4) optimal operation strategies for existing preparation steps and new preparation steps that will be under higher pressure in the future when the raw water is changing, as well as (5) possibilities to communicate and compare information between different actors in the industry.

Planned approach and implementation

Through workshops, digital surveys and in meetings with drinking water plants we have investigated the interest for DigiDrick and charted which skills we lacked. We have extended the consortium with IT-Automation to help develop an IT solution. The plants in Trollhättan, Växjö, Kungälv, Varberg and Falkenberg have joined the consortium to get a good picture of the diversification within the industry. Luode, selling equipment for water analysis, has joined to increase the knowledge in water quality. To meet the need of IT-security expertise the company Sectra has also joined the team.