Real-World Wastewater Industry Use Cases Powered by HiveMQ

In Part 1 of this blog series, Benefits of the Open Standard MQTT in the Wastewater Industry, we went over the challenges faced by the wastewater industry, how IIoT addresses these challenges and how MQTT enables IIoT data availability to support wastewater management. In Part 2 of this blog series, we will look at how HiveMQ is enabling IIoT use cases for a few of its customers in the wastewater industry.

HiveMQ is the proven enterprise MQTT platform because it’s reliable under real-world stress — built for flexibility, security, and scale, and enables IoT data use cases for its customers in the wastewater industry. Let’s look at some of the ways we help our customers. 

Efficiently and Securely Transmitting Data for Monitoring Applications

LEC provides clients such as municipalities and others in the wastewater industry with high-quality industrial automation, control engineering, industrial IoT enablement, and cloud platform services. They faced some data challenges around efficiently monitoring and controlling remote assets like wells, pumps, motors, and water usage systems, while ensuring high data security and preventing downtimes. The main issue was around lack of good connectivity coupled with bandwidth constraints which lead to data losses and lack of good quality real-time data to run their remote monitoring applications optimally. The other issue was security, especially when it came to controlling remote assets, as a breach would mean that a rogue player could contaminate the water which could lead to disastrous outcomes.The existing solution that they had in place did not scale as they looked to monitor many assets across different locations. 

They realized that MQTT was the right solution for them, considering that it could work efficiently in constrained environments and was bandwidth efficient. They chose HiveMQ to connect the data from multiple remote assets to their data center on the enterprise. This is because of HiveMQ’s ability to easily scale to the multiple number of connections, its robust security features for data at rest and data in motion, and its reliability features, including high availability, which would prevent data loss.

The outcomes for LEC have been positive. They were able to save millions of dollars for customers by reducing the cost of data transmission. They were also able to enable leak detection and management services to reduce or eliminate water waste. Last but not least, they were able to seamlessly connect thousands of devices and sensors.

Overcoming Operational Hurdles to Drive Digital Transformation 

Currenta provides infrastructure management and services for CHEMPARK, one of Europe’s largest chemical parks. They ensure the safety of the site, manage waste disposal, and provide means for production such as process water, steam, and energy. Currenta offers a multitude of chemical management operations. One of its offerings is wastewater testing services to companies located inside or outside of the CHEMPARK. There were a couple of challenges with the wastewater testing services. The first challenge was around decentralization, which led to efficiencies in the wastewater testing process. The second was around a lack of standardized CHEMPARK-wide sampling services. 

Recognizing the need to overhaul its wastewater process sampling, Currenta needed to deploy automated sampling devices, which required a secure, efficient wireless communication system. Currenta recognized MQTT as an ideal protocol because of the security features, small code footprint, and ease of use. They chose HiveMQ as the MQTT broker to take advantage of the platform's clustering feature for high availability, and the security features to manage IoT devices.

Currenta has really benefited from HiveMQ’s product offerings. Its new systems with HiveMQ have helped streamlined operations and reduced network overhead. HiveMQ has also enabled the broadening of Currenta’s business offerings and helped the company introduce new services using online sampling devices.

Enabling Efficient Asset Performance Management 

Anglian Water is the largest water and water recycling company in England and Wales by geographic area. They supply water and water recycling services to almost seven million people in the East of England and Hartlepool. They have a number of challenges in their operations — which include addressing flooding, climate change, and droughts — that they need to handle and still provide a great customer experience. To prepare for this and to support their long-term plans, they want to digitally transform their operations. It starts with the Internet of Things (IoT). They would like to use this for Asset Performance Management (APM) of all their remote assets immediately. In the future, they would like to explore other areas like Digital Twin, and advanced analytics so that they can improve operational efficiency, improve environmental performance, and increase compliance while delighting their customers.

At Anglian Water, they have a lot of data coming in, collected at different frequencies from various operational sites and assets that they handle. A lot of that data coming from the various systems is highly unformatted. Their challenge is to pull all that data together into a single source of truth, format it in a way that makes it easier to analyze and get insights from that data to drive innovation and performance. This is where they found MQTT and HiveMQ’s capabilities ideal for their purpose. They are also exploring creating a Unified Namespace (UNS) to be able to see all of their events, alarms, and latest asset data values through one location to efficiently do APM. They found MQTT and HiveMQ ideal to enable that. HiveMQ offers features that they need. They get the scale that they need to connect to multiple assets. They also have the reliability and resilience needed to ensure data is real-time, high quality, and highly available. Of course, security is at the forefront of all water operations, and they can get that with HiveMQ.

While Anglian is still in the early stages with HiveMQ, they already see a lot of benefits like being able to see all of their data, alarms, and events in one location in real-time. What they like about HiveMQ is that HiveMQ has really been invested in understanding Anglian’s mission: offering support and technical expertise where necessary for design decisions, sharing knowledge regarding how other similar customers use the product, and ensuring that they are ready for the next 5 years and beyond.

HiveMQ: The Central Nervous System for the Wastewater Industry

MQTT plays a vital role in enhancing efficiency, reliability, and resilience in wastewater operations by enabling real-time monitoring, remote control, data integration, and automation. Its open standard, lightweight, scalable, and interoperable nature makes it well-suited for addressing the complex challenges faced by the industry. It enables IoT solutions in wastewater to optimize operations and enhance safety. HiveMQ builds on top of MQTT to provide the data backbone to enable wastewater industry customers — such as LEC, Currenta, and Anglian Water — to achieve their IoT use cases such as APM, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and others.