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Dam Safety Intelligence uses open source to go above and beyond
01 Oct 2021, 9:00 AMExplore how Dam Safety Intelligence ensures the tools for dam motoring are world-class with quality built in with a cloud-native solution.
Background
Dam Safety Intelligence (DSI) is a subsidiary of giant electricity company Meridian Energy. DSI is responsible for 12 staff and is New Zealand’s only specialist dam safety consultant. They cover the spectrum of dam owners, from very large, like hydro dams (including Meridian’s), to small, and from the old (100 years old) to relatively new (20 years old).
DSI helps monitor and manage over 100 dams, serving energy companies, water supply authorities, irrigators, and councils. Internationally, it monitors dams in Fiji and the Philippines and provides dam safety management services to clients in Australia, the United States, Canada, and Sweden.
Opportunity
DSI needed a system that was on a modern platform, using modern code and platform components. Other “off the shelf” offshore systems were trialled and assessed, but none had the breadth and depth of functionality needed or the necessary quality assurance and audibility.
Solution
DSI decided to rebuild its Dam Monitoring System (DMS) software with Catalyst. The DMS software is the primary tool for:
- data handling,
- quality assurance,
- dam performance evaluation,
- and reporting.
The rebuild focused on leveraging the principles and functionality of the legacy system from various modules. It ran on old hardware using a relational database in the Progress 4GL language back when screens didn't have a GUI (graphical user interface). Therefore, the graphs and plots were basic due to recording manual observations with hand-held data loggers.
The new system is cloud native. It uses the same sorts of structures as any scalable cloud product – containers, microservice architectures, and modern languages, with all the benefits these technologies bring:
- scalability,
- redundancy,
- automated deployments,
- and efficient use of cloud resources.
Dan Foster, General Manager, Dam Safety Intelligence
The system is world-class. It means we are monitoring New Zealand’s legacy dam infrastructure with the best tools possible, and it puts us in a unique position internationally to offer that service more widely.
Making the complex, simple
The system runs in the Catalyst Cloud and uses Kubernetes, Docker and Python. The interface is browser-based, enabling engineers to use it on their phones and access it offline. This means engineers in remote locations can now log data when they return to areas with internet access.
The system enables DSI to take millions of data points across thousands of measuring points, reducing the readings into engineering measurements, and then transforms this information into a graph, making it easy for engineers to understand.
The work with DSI is a great example of how an expert open source solution can deliver above and beyond any off-the-shelf software and, better yet, host it onshore. So from data coming into the system, being processed, being validated against alert thresholds, being plotted into engineering plots and charts for our team to analyse, and then for our team to capture their analysis in terms of written content that gets associated with that data, as well as the senior-level review and validation that we apply over that.
Dan Foster, General Manager, Dam Safety Intelligence
A key benefit of our Dam Monitoring System [is] the inherent quality assurance principles that are built into its design.
Quality built in
Dan Foster, General Manager, Dam Safety Intelligence, shares his team is delighted with the results. He continues, “A key benefit of our Dam Monitoring System [is] the inherent quality assurance principles that are built into its design. So, what that means is that we have a lot of checks and balances on the data as it progresses through our workflow, so from data coming into the system, being processed, being validated against alert thresholds, being plotted into engineering plots and charts for our team to analyse it, and then for our team to capture their analysis in terms of written content that gets associated with that data, as well as the senior level of review and validation that we apply over that.”
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