Digital Case Study: Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant BioWin Process Modeling, City of Baltimore, MD

Bringing legacy infrastructure into the digital age

With a service area of 390 square miles and a network of around 3,100 miles of service pipes, the citizens of Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard County and Anne Arundel County rely on Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) to keep their local environment and waterways clean and healthy. The functioning of the plant is something that is usually out of sight and out of mind in residents’ everyday lives – until elements within this complex, legacy infrastructure start to fail.

In recent years, Back River WWTP has experienced operation and maintenance challenges due to the aging infrastructure, which has led to occasional discharge of effluent exceeding the permit limits for some of the parameters. The City needed to take urgent steps to achieve compliance and protect its residents and the environment, including Back River and Chesapeake Bay.

In March 2022, the City of Baltimore engaged our team to develop a BioWin process model of the Back River WWTP to assess and optimize plant performance, to project effluent quality and to support future plant improvement projects. Work began immediately to bring the monitoring of this aging wastewater infrastructure into the digital age.

The Challenges

With political and local pressure and negative media coverage mounting, quickly assessing the operational status of the plant and its challenges was imperative. The plant’s legacy monitoring system couldn’t provide reliable information for decision making and task prioritization. The lack of visibility of flow status and breakdowns was a major barrier to identifying and efficiently resolving issues.

As a result, the City issued an emergency authorization contract to immediately start reaching out for a partner to help create a digital solution for the monitoring of the plant.

Getting ahead of the problem

Our team's previous engineering work at Back River WWTP and their familiarity with its operations allowed for prompt engagement and initiation of the project with minimal time lost to learning curves.

Being able to see the problem was the first step to getting ahead of it. Our solution was to create a digital model and accessible web-based interface of the plant that would give the client visibility on the status of activity and areas of strain, so that funding could be directed to the priority fixes, and support efficiency of operations overall.

BioWin modeling created a semi-automated, interactive process flow diagram allowing any stakeholder up-to-date status of the plant’s elements and components. A web-based interface of the model delivered a digital record that enables the client to report and explain the current operational status of every component and supporting facilities to the regulators—in short, what isn’t working, where, and why, and the projected timeline for repair. Features include interactive animation of the process flow diagram, an overall site plan, location of facilities, the purpose of each unit’s operations and the qualitative impact on effluent and biosolids.

Due to the urgency of the case, the model was created within two months, from concept to completion. Immersive collaboration with the client helped the team understand each component part of the plant, accelerating creation of the detailed tool, which has also opened the door to continued partnership to ensure the future resilience of the plant.

From a lack of visibility to compliance

The BioWin process model of the plant and its web-based interface enable swift assessment of the plant’s performance under different conditions. Opportunities for improvement and optimization can then be identified and reviewed to accelerate the journey towards consistent regulatory compliance.

Designed to minimize learning curves, its user-friendly web-based interface means stakeholders can operate it and access the information they need, when they need it, for reporting to regulators and for accelerated problem solving.

The Back River WWTP project embodies our approach of integrating people, data and technology for best results. Rather than providing a single digital solution in isolation, the close relationship with our client has also allowed our team to look beyond the present emergency, to provide a system that can act as a foundation for building future efficiency and resilience.

The team continues to evolve and enhance the tool to improve visualization and digital twin development, expanding support for wider operations and helping the client navigate this digitally enabled improvement journey.

A version of this article was originally published December 12, 2022, in Engineering News-Record’s Mid-Atlantic regional issue.