Proactive Decentralized Historian-Improving Legacy System in the Water Industry 4.0 Context

Abstract

The industry is in continuous evolution in the context of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 requirements and expected benefits. Some sectors allow higher reconfiguration dynamics considering the interference capabilities and process/equipment renewals, but others have considerable inertia that is many times justified. In most encountered situations, the reality confirms that the industry is struggling with new demands such as interoperation and efficiency improvements. The water industry makes no difference, being a sector with critical infrastructures and highly varied subsystems, where invasive interference in legacy solutions tends to be avoided. Following previous successful footsteps in researching a proactive decentralized historian, the current work focuses on a case study that refers to a water treatment and distribution facility that has been operated for several years, and the current operating regime was established by local operators following accumulated observations, restrictions, and response strategies. The proactive historian was tailored for the current case study, and it was applied and tested in the suboptimal functioning scenario where the water sources configuration was manually selected and used for water availability and energy efficiency, but without assuming current/future failures or different water demands. The proposed low-cost historian targeted to improve the functioning and operation of the water facility considering energy efficiency and other impacting outcomes of the current strategy and to establish an automatic functioning regime in a completely non-invasive manner towards the local legacy solution. The results were satisfactory, proving that the historian is able to adapt to a particular and suboptimal functioning real industrial scenario, establish recipes in a process-aware manner, and interoperate with the local legacy solution in order to apply improving actions.