Broomfield, Colorado USA, October 26, 2005
- MWH Soft, a leading global provider of
environmental and water resources applications
software, today announced the newest version of
its acclaimed energy management solution for water
distribution systems, H2OMAP Scheduler.
This major software release offers sophisticated,
customer-driven capabilities that enable water
utilities worldwide to leverage the power of real-time
data management and advanced nature-based optimization
technologies. These powerful advantages enable
users to move to higher levels of productivity
and efficiency by quickly developing sound, cost-effective
pumping policies that reduce operational and chemical
costs and enable more reliable operations.
Energy costs generally constitute the largest
expenditure for nearly all water utilities worldwide,
consuming as much as 65 percent of their annual
operating budgets. One of the greatest avenues
for energy cost savings is improved scheduling
of daily pump operations. The new Scheduler module
is expressly designed to help water distribution
system operators (and train new operators) to
manage energy consumption more effectively and
improve overall operations with optimized pumping
strategies and reservoir control. Using real-time
data, the program automatically pinpoints the
daily pump scheduling that best meets target hydraulic
and water quality performance requirements at
maximum cost savings.
First introduced in 1999, MWH Soft Scheduler
has changed the way utility operators and engineering
professionals around the world make informed decisions
on managing their water distribution systems to
maximize energy savings and optimize system performance.
The operation policy for a pump station represents
a set of temporal rules or guidelines (pump operating
times) that indicate when a particular pump or
group of pumps should be turned on and off over
a specified period of time, typically 24 hours.
The optimal pump policy is the schedule of pump
operations that will yield the lowest operating
cost while satisfying the desired operational
performance of the water system: maintaining an
adequate pressure range and meeting water turnover
and storage requirements. Both energy consumption
($/kW.h) and demand charges ($/max kW) are explicitly
considered.
The new version of H2OMAP Scheduler
is designed for on-line applications with various
SCADA systems, and can be dynamically driven by
an external process or computer program for high-end
custom applications. This enables users to directly
build, access, and modify model parameters, launch
the application, retrieve results, and customize
model software to suit their application-specific
needs. Scheduler also employs the latest advances
in nature-based Particle Swarm Optimization and
Genetic Algorithm optimization technology, enriched
with global search control strategies to automatically
determine the optimal pump operation policy for
each pump station in the system. By quickly pinpointing
the scheduling that best meets target hydraulic
and water quality performance requirements, the
program facilitates greater productivity with
fewer errors, reducing operational and chemical
costs and maximizing energy savings.
The new Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is
the latest advances in population based stochastic
optimization techniques, inspired by social behavior
of birds. PSO shares many similarities with evolutionary
computation techniques such as Genetic Algorithms
(GA). The system is initialized with a population
of random solutions and searches for global minima/maxima
by updating generations. However, unlike GA, PSO
has no evolution operators such as crossover and
mutation. In PSO, the potential solutions, called
particles, fly through the problem space by following
the current optimum particles and land on the
best solution. Compared to GA, the main advantages
of PSO are that it requires fewer parameters to
be adjusted and exhibits faster convergence characteristics.
"The new H2OMAP Scheduler is
an invaluable water distribution planning and
operations tool," said Paul F. Boulos, Ph.D,
President and Chief Operating Officer of MWH Soft.
"It will greatly aid water utilities in improving
the efficiency of their distribution systems by
evaluating various rate schedules, optimizing
residence times and storage/pumping trade-offs,
and ensuring more reliable operations. Since day
one, our mission has been to bring powerful product
development capabilities to the engineering modeling
community and foster its expansion in the process.
This new version is a significant leap - one that
exemplifies our ongoing commitment to delivering
superior value to our customers who manage and
operate safe, reliable drinking water distribution
systems. It greatly enhances their ability to
produce the best possible pumping schedules with
minimum effort, reduced labor requirements and
significant cost savings. MWH Soft is very
proud to offer this revolutionary new power tool
to our clients."
Pricing and Availability
The new H2OMAP Scheduler extension
is now available worldwide by subscription to
the Platinum Program. Subscription members can
immediately download the new extension free of
charge directly from www.mwhsoft.com.
The MWH Soft Subscription Program is a friendly
customer support and software maintenance program
that ensures the longevity and usefulness of MWH Soft
products. It gives subscribers instant access
to new functionality as it is developed, along
with automatic software updates and upgrades.
MWH Soft product extensions are available
only through the Platinum Program. For the latest
information on the MWH Soft Subscription
Program, visit www.mwhsoft.com
or contact your local MWH Soft Certified
Representative.
