As water utilities navigate a rapidly changing landscape, digital twins are emerging as a game-changing solution. By integrating data from IoT sensors, SCADA, GIS, and more, they enable utilities to simulate scenarios, detect anomalies, and optimize operations. Trinnex’s waterCAST® platform brings this vision to life with explainable AI, modular applications, and SOC 2-verified security. It empowers utilities to move from reactive to proactive management, streamline compliance, and improve decision-making.
Let’s explore how digital twins are transforming water management and how your utility can harness their full potential.
What Does a Digital Twin Look Like in Water Utilities?
A digital twin is a dynamic, virtual representation of a corresponding physical system, meticulously synchronized to faithfully reproduce its performance in near real-time. This concept is applicable across the entire water lifecycle, creating digital replicas of assets and infrastructure such as collection systems, treatment plants, pump stations, or entire distribution networks. This is achieved by integrating a high-fidelity simulation model with live, streaming data from diverse sources including SCADA systems, GIS, operational data, and maintenance records.
Through a core process known as data assimilation, the digital twin continuously incorporates these data streams to update the system’s simulated state. This allows for accurate, system-wide estimations of performance, even at unmeasured locations, and ensures the model is continuously calibrated to reflect reality. This powerful virtual replica enables utilities to move beyond conventional offline modeling for planning purposes. It provides the capability for advanced monitoring, simulation, analysis, optimization, and prediction. Utilities can use it to conduct real-time "flight simulator" analysis (also known as what-if scenario analysis), forecast system behavior, optimize asset operations for energy efficiency, design and plan infrastructure expansion, and develop robust emergency response plans.
At Trinnex, this vision comes to life through waterCAST, our AI-powered digital twin platform built for the entire water sector. waterCAST operationalizes this technology, transforming fragmented data into a cohesive, actionable virtual model. It provides the essential data assimilation and analytical capabilities to help your utility shift from reactive firefighting to proactive, data-driven resilience and optimized infrastructure management.
Why Do Digital Twins Matter for Water Utilities Now?
Water utilities are at a critical juncture, equipped with more streaming, near real-time data from sources like SCADA, GIS, IoT, and CMMS data than ever before. However, conventional approaches such as hydraulic models - typically used as static, offline tools for long-term planning and design - are not built to leverage this constant influx of dynamic information. This creates a gap between having data and having actionable, real-time insight.
A digital twin bridges this gap. It is much more than a simulation model; it is a dynamic, high-fidelity digital representation of your physical system, synchronized in near real-time. By continuously incorporating live data through a core process called data assimilation, a digital twin provides a holistic and constantly calibrated view of network or asset performance. This transforms your utility’s capabilities, enabling a shift from reactive, offline analysis to proactive, real-time operational management and smarter long-term planning.
A digital twin streamlines operations and elevates decision-making by:
- Consolidating Disparate Data into a Single Source of Truth: It integrates streaming data from SCADA, high-granularity demand data from AMI, asset data from GIS and more into a single, high-fidelity virtual model. This unified system is continuously updated and calibrated to faithfully reproduce reality, reducing the uncertainties that limit conventional approaches.
- Enhancing Real-Time Situational Awareness: A digital twin provides a holistic overview of the entire system in real-time, allowing operators to visualize network performance and observe streaming values of pressures, flows, water levels, and water quality. By integrating forecasting capabilities, it can also anticipate major changes in demands, flows, and pressures, allowing for proactive adjustments rather than reactive responses.
- Improving Strategic and Operational Decision-Making: The virtual environment of a digital twin allows for powerful flight simulator analysis without physical risk. This capability supports a wide range of critical utility functions, including designing infrastructure for improved energy efficiency, optimizing pump and valve operations, scheduling maintenance activities, and developing robust emergency response plans.
- Driving Proactive Resilience and Optimization: By reconciling real-time data with model predictions, a digital twin can identify anomalies in system behavior, such as leaks, malfunctioning equipment, or chemical dosing optimization. It provides new insights for managing infrastructure during unexpected events and hazards and can serve as an advanced tool for training operators to optimize day-to-day operations and respond effectively to emergencies.
- Maintaining Institutional Knowledge During Workforce Changes: A digital twin has the potential to streamline operations and improve decision-making by preserving institutional knowledge - especially during workforce transitions. One of the utilities that Trinnex works with explored using a digital twin to train incoming staff, particularly in light of a senior team member’s upcoming retirement. Trinnex developed the model to capture that individual’s expertise, which the senior member could then review and approve, proving that digital twins could also serve as a valuable tool for utilities facing the challenges of an aging workforce.
The Trinnex Approach: waterCAST in Action
Trinnex’s waterCAST platform exemplifies the power of digital twins in action thorugh using a secure flexible data assimilation process that is powered by AI and physics-infused AI models enabled by explinable AI. waterCAST meets utilities where they are, whether they’re just beginning their digital journey or scaling advanced analytics.
Key Capabilities:
- Glass-Box AI: Our platform is built on a transparent, high-fidelity simulation model grounded in the governing equations of hydraulics that characterize the physics of your system. AI and data assimilation routines enhance this physics-based core, not replace it, ensuring that every insight is both accurate and completely understandable.
- SOC 2-verified security: Ensures data integrity and compliance with the highest cybersecurity standards.
- Modular applications: Including waterCAST WQ (water quality), waterCAST Sewer (collection systems), and waterCAST Surveillance (public health monitoring).
These applications are not theoretical-they’re field-tested and delivering results. The waterCAST digital twin provides a continuously updated, holistic overview of any physical system-from individual assets like pumps to entire collection networks or treatment facilities-turning vast streams of data into true foresight and decisive action. For example, waterCAST Sewer uses digital twin technology to detect discrepancies between predicted and actual system behavior, helping utilities identify overflows and blockages before they escalate.
Understanding Impact of Digital Twins: On Now and the Future
Digital twins play a larger role in the big picture - to analyze past data, build holistic view of current systems, and predict future scenarios. Here’s how:
- Nowcast (The Present): A digital twin provides a holistic, real-time view of your physical assets and infrastructure. Through continuous data assimilation, it integrates streaming data from SCADA systems, process sensors, and other operational data sources to faithfully reproduce system performance in near real-time. This gives operators unparalleled, live situational awareness of operational performance, asset conditions, and key process variables across the entire system.
- Forecast (The Future): Using this highly accurate, real-time model as a baseline, a digital twin can predict short-term system behaviors. It enables powerful flight simulator analysis to optimize operational strategies for assets like pumps and treatment processes, design infrastructure, and develop robust emergency response plans - all within a risk-free virtual environment.
- Hindcast (The Past): A digital twin serves as a powerful investigative tool to analyze past performance and understand discrepancies between model predictions and field observations. By reconciling historical data with the physics-based model, utilities can uncover the root causes of past events and identify previously unknown system characteristics.
For example, a utility could use a digital twin of its wastewater treatment plant to investigate a persistent discrepancy where the model's predicted effluent quality does not match sensor readings. Even after accounting for known influent characteristics, the deviation remains. Because the digital twin provides a high-fidelity replica, the investigation helps "daylight" hidden uncertainties in the plant's actual physical processes. The hindcast analysis might reveal that the discrepancy is not a single issue, but a combination of multiple anomalies: a critical pump performing slightly below its specified efficiency curve, a chemical dosing system that is subtly miscalibrated, and the lingering impacts of a recent high-inflow event that were not fully captured by traditional monitoring.
Real-World Impact: From Insight to Action
When the city of New Bedford, MA, faced regulatory requirements for public overflow notifications, the city leveraged waterCAST to integrate sensor data and automate alerts. The result was faster response time, improved public trust, and recognition at the New England Stormwater Collaborative’s Stormy Awards.
In another case, Trinnex helped consolidate thousands of legacy spreadsheets into a single, searchable platform, saving time and unlocking insights that were previously buried in silos.
Digital Twins and the Future of Utility Management
Digital twins are more than a tool; they’re taking forward the philosophy of continuous improvement, helping utilities turn data into foresight and action.
By enabling powerful flight simulator analysis and forecasting, utilities can:
- Proactively manage asset health by identifying anomalies in system behavior and assessing pipeline conditions, enabling a shift from reactive repairs to predictive maintenance scheduling.
- Optimize maintenance schedules by moving from time-based cycles to condition-based interventions, informed by the real-time performance of pumps, valves, and other critical components.
- Improve service reliability across diverse communities by visualizing network performance and inspecting clusters of maintenance issues, pressure fluctuations, or water quality incidents across the entire service area.
- Strengthen capital improvement planning by using a high-fidelity model to more accurately assess infrastructure designs and prioritize investments based on system-wide performance data and forecasted needs.
Furthermore, with institutional knowledge embedded in this dynamic system, you can use the digital twin as a powerful training tool. This allows new and existing operators to learn how to optimize day-to-day operations and respond effectively to emergencies in a risk-free virtual environment, ensuring informed decisions from day one.
Overcoming Barriers to Adoption
Despite the promise, some utilities hesitate to adopt digital twins due to perceived complexity or cost. Trinnex addresses these concerns head-on by building solutions that provide:
- Accessibility on-ramp: Whether you’re managing spreadsheets or advanced SCADA systems, waterCAST adapts to your environment.
- Dedicated digital services: Trinnex offers consulting support to assess readiness, define roadmaps, and implement solutions tailored to each utility’s needs.
- Proven ROI: From reducing inspection contracts by 50% to improving compliance accuracy, the platform delivers measurable value.
- A custom solution, designed for impact. We've built this platform by listening to your needs, so it delivers exactly the answers you're looking for to drive meaningful results.
From Pipe to Pixel: The Time for a Paradigm Shift
The shift from physical to digital infrastructure is not just technological—it’s cultural. At Trinnex, we’re proud to lead this transformation. With deep industry expertise, proven tools, and a commitment to responsible innovation, we help utilities build smarter, safer, and more sustainable water systems. Contact us to learn more!
