Century Engineering turns to the cloud to keep our waterways clean
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Customer Case Study – Multidisciplinary Engineering
Century Engineering
turns to the cloud to keep
our waterways clean
By leveraging IoT and automation, this innovative engineering
firm monitors stormwater more efficiently to help remove
pollutants, minimize flooding and reduce land erosion.
Our customer The obstacles they faced
Founded in 1953, Century Engineering is a Century wanted to leverage IoT and the
multidisciplinary consulting firm that assists cloud to securely scale its tech-driven
public and private clients in the planning, system that monitored local conditions,
design and management of a wide range of assessed forecasted precipitation data and
engineering services, from civil engineering autonomously controlled the operations of
to wastewater management. stormwater facilities.
How we helped What we achieved together
Managed Public Cloud — AWS, Cloud Native Onica (a Rackspace Technology company)
Development, Internet of Things (IoT) and supported Century’s SmartSWM™ product
Edge development; Professional Services; team in designing and developing the
Data Engineering and Analytics. micro controller, IoT hardware and
firmware, and the IoT backend to its AWS
cloud infrastructure to deliver a resilient,
innovative stormwater management
control system.
“We had knowledge gaps
around cloud architectures
and AWS services in
general. The Onica team
filled in those gaps
and got our solution
off the ground”
Bob Bathurst
Principal, Century Engineering
Seeking a solution to remote stormwater facility monitoring and
automated control. The result is the creation
data, stormwater management facilities are
predominately designed to retain stormwater
to track current facility storage and
precipitation forecasts, then autonomously
meet EPA compliance of an intelligent stormwater management runoff for no more than two days so they control a valve to adjust stored water
system that leverages an Internet of Things can be prepared for the next rain event. volumes. A stormwater management facility’s
Stormwater runoff is one of the greatest
(IoT) device and AWS Cloud. This uniform modeling assumes that all storage volume is adjusted automatically in
challenges for water pollution control,
wet weather events behave in the same response to anticipated inflow associated
because stormwater contamination is a To create the market-ready solution, the ways. This approach is counterproductive to with forecasted precipitation events. An
leading contributor to the impairment of company utilized services from Onica. Onica achieving maximum pollutant removal and outflow occurs in response to and in advance
water bodies nationwide, according the is a leading AWS Partner Network (APN) runoff reduction since prolonging retention of a forecasted precipitation event; therefore,
Environmental Protection Agency. In 1987, the Premier Consulting Partner and the expertise time in the stormwater practice is the no discharge occurs during the precipitation
U.S. Congress mandated the EPA to control in IoT and AWS services that they brought to principal means by which enhanced pollutant event nor during the subsequent retention
stormwater discharges according to the Clean the project made them an ideal partner. removal and runoff reduction is achieved. period. This technique provides the maximum
Water Act of 1972. Among the EPA regulations
retention time as determined from real-time,
is a requirement to monitor stormwater
facility performance to help ensure intended
Choosing the In 2013, Century Engineering conceived a
new approach to the situation. Principal
hyper-local weather forecast data while
significantly reducing downstream erosion
pollution control goals are reached. ideal AWS partner Bob Bathurst, a professional engineer and from flooding.
Diplomate of the American Academy of Water
Meeting that compliance directive has not According to applicable local, state, and/ Resources Engineers, began working on an Our system worked well but needed
been easy, because manually monitoring or federal regulations, owners of developed idea that resulted in the creation of a first- to be prepared for production-level
stormwater facility performance can be land are required to treat stormwater generation smart stormwater management applications,” said Bathurst. “The system
difficult. Century Engineering, headquartered runoff to reduce pollutants before releasing system that used leading web application required improvements to the hardware
in Hunt Valley, Maryland, began looking it back into the environment. However, development frameworks, microcontrollers configurations, and we needed to better
for a solution that could provide real-time without accurate, real-time precipitation and sensors. The system was designed
Rackspace Technology Customer Case Study 2
leverage the outputs of our on-board sensors
so the system could perform more reliably.
“That’s when we turned to AWS, which
connected us with Onica through its business
partner program. Onica helped us to improve
our overall product architecture, design
custom hardware and refine our back-
end logic to improve overall SmartSWM™
performance and scalability. Working with
Onica was probably the best decision
we could have made at that juncture of
development. We worked really well together,
and we appreciate everything the team has
done to help us get SmartSWM™ where
it is today.”
Solving challenges to
deliver higher performance
A key driver for Century was the development
of this innovative stormwater management
solution into a product ready for
commercial-level applications. As a result,
the performance of the system had to be
resilient under highly variable conditions,
reliable so that it effectively improves water
quality and reduces runoff, and secure to
prevent unwanted intruders into the system.
These objectives were met thanks to Onica’s
recommendations. Onica’s team worked on
a solution for Century in two phases. First,
it focused on refining the prior proof-of-
“Partnering with Onica was
concept hardware solution by integrating probably the best decision
useful, disparate functions to read
environmental data and control equipment.
I could have made. We
A key design consideration included worked really well together.
overcoming a prior challenge with the analog-
to-digital circuitry interface, verifying that
I appreciate everything the
the existing loop conversion did not destroy team has done for us.”
the analog signals.
Bob Bathurst
Principal, Century Engineering
Rackspace Technology Customer Case Study 3Filling knowledge gaps whether the release valves are opened or
closed, and by how much. Everything is
the next level. “Traditional stormwater
modeling techniques consider the hydrologic
About Rackspace
with AWS Cloud and programmed. And we can go in remotely characteristics of watersheds to estimate Technology
IoT expertise and perform actions, such as change the runoff volume,” he said. “But we’ve come to
Rackspace Technology is the multicloud
stormwater discharge rate if we need to.” recognize those estimates to be somewhat
solutions expert. We combine our expertise
In phase two, the Onica team focused on inaccurate. It can vary wildly. This is likely
with the world’s leading technologies —
enhancing the AWS environment and making due to the industry-accepted practice to
improvements to the hardware by defining Making land use more assume average conditions for parameters
across applications, data and security — to
deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a
requirements for tamper detection and
alerting, managing the signal-to-noise ratio,
efficient like antecedent soil moisture condition
and mischaracterization of the soil’s ability
proven record of advising customers based
on their business challenges, designing
and providing component guidance, such as “A major benefit to smart stormwater to absorb water. However, once we have
solutions that scale, building and managing
with the water depth sensor. management is that we’re able to use land accumulated enough precipitation and runoff
those solutions, and optimizing returns
more efficiently,” said Bathurst. “Stormwater data, we can then apply machine learning
“The sensor that measures the water depth into the future.
management facilities are different sizes to create predictive models that tell us how
is an analog device,” said Bathurst. “The each stormwater facility will respond to
and hold different volumes of water. With As a global, multicloud technology services
signal it sends looks like an EKG report. weather events based on how the facilities
the SmartSWM™ technology, we can actively pioneer, we deliver innovative capabilities
Obviously, water surfaces don’t modulate have responded in the past.
manage stormwater facility volumes and, as a of the cloud to help customers build new
like EKGs. Onica worked through tedious
result, each stormwater facility can occupy a revenue streams, increase efficiency and
issues like this.” “Machine learning is where we think we’re
smaller land ‘footprint.’ This efficiency yields create incredible experiences. Named a best
going to make our next big improvement,”
“There were many little fixes like that along more land for development or alternate uses. place to work, year after year according to
Bathurst added. “We’ve already started
the way through which we were able to Fortune, Forbes, and Glassdoor, we attract
“In addition, our experience has shown developing algorithms to begin training. This
leverage the experience Onica has and that and develop world-class talent to deliver the
that public entities appreciate the higher is going to be another paradigm shift.”
we lack,” Bathurst said. “We had knowledge best expertise to our customers. Everything
pollutant removal performance, land we do is wrapped in our obsession with
gaps around cloud architectures and AWS Staying out in front of the market is critical
efficiency and minimization of flooding and our customers’ success — our Fanatical
services in general. I don’t even have enough for smart technologies. Bathurst said,
land erosion,” Bathurst said. “It’s just a new Experience™ — so they can work faster,
time in the day to think about these issues. “Working with Onica has allowed us to stay
era in stormwater management. smarter and stay ahead of what’s next.
The Onica team filled in those gaps and got on top of the available technologies, and
our solution off the ground.” “In my mind, the future of stormwater they have supported our project in a way that
Learn more at www.rackspace.com or call
management involves connected, intelligent reinforces we are building one of the most
1-800-961-2888.
and adaptive infrastructure. We are already reliable IoT and automated approaches to
Delivering high working on making interrelated facilities stormwater management.”
performance via real-time in a geographic region work as a system to
This case study is for your informational purposes only. RACKSPACE MAKES
further improve how we manage an entire
remote access watershed. This presents us with the ability
NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. All customer
examples and the information and results illustrated here are based upon
the customer’s experiences with the referenced Rackspace services and are
to improve water quality throughout larger not necessarily indicative of the future performance of Rackspace services.
“We can extract hyper-local weather forecast Rackspace detailed services descriptions and legal commitments are stated
regions, not just discrete facilities, resulting in its services agreements. Rackspace services’ features and benefits
data for any location,” Bathurst said. “We depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware,
in even greater positive impacts.” software or additional service activation. Actual cost of specific hosted
can also monitor our solar generation and environment and performance characteristics will vary depending on
individual customer configurations and use case.
consumption, and water temperature. That
feeds into our backend decision support
Keeping an eye on the
Copyright © 2021 Rackspace :: Rackspace®, Fanatical Support®, Fanatical
Experience™ and other Rackspace marks are either registered service
system, which sits in the cloud. It computes marks or service marks of Rackspace US, Inc. in the United States and other
future of innovation
countries. All other trademarks, service marks, images, products and brands
the optimal water surface elevations of the remain the sole property of their respective holders and do not imply
endorsement or sponsorship
ponds, along with the discharge rate at which
they should be releasing stormwater. As far as the SmartSWM™ team has come March 25, 2021 / Rackspace-Case-Study-Century-Engineering-ITT-TSK-3235
in developing this innovative approach
“All of that information is then transferred to to stormwater management, Bathurst
our on-site micro-controller. Then it dictates already sees an opportunity to take it to
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