ISA announces 2012 Water/Wastewater Symposium award winners

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — The International Society of Automation (ISA) announced the award winners for Best Paper, Best Presentation, and Best Poster from its recently held 2012 ISA Water/Wastewater and Automatic Controls Symposium (WWAC Symposium). The symposium program featured more than 30 speakers who addressed the varied challenges of automation, instrumentation, and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) in the municipal water and wastewater sectors. Considerable attention also was given to the growing importance of cybersecurity, process visibility and asset performance during the symposium’s technical program.

First Place for Best Paper was awarded to Creig Wilson and Jared Thorpe of CH2M HILL for their paper entitled “High Fidelity Extended Period Dynamic Simulation in Development and Testing of Control Systems for Water Treatment and Distribution Facilities.” The paper highlighted the many benefits of using advanced process simulation as a design, testing and verification tool for municipal water plants.

Symposium program chair Joe Provenzano remarked: “The paper provided a fresh look at the new approaches for plant design and optimization.”

Several other prizes for papers also were awarded. Don Dickinson of Phoenix Contact won Second Place for his paper entitled “Securing Critical Control Systems in the Water Sector—Where do I Begin?,” which pinpointed new trends in cybersecurity. Third Place was awarded to Michael Waddell of CDM Smith and Isabel Szendrey of the Puerto Rico Water Authority for their paper, “Development of an Integrated Business Solution with Telemetry and GIS,” which highlighted a recently deployed island-wide SCADA project in Puerto Rico. David Wilcoxson of MWH Americans and Travis Crane from the Jacksonville Energy Authority received Honorable Mention for their paper, “Optimization of Wastewater Lift Station for Reduction of Energy Usage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”

The Best Presentation award was presented to Bob Dusza, Jr. of the Manchester (Connecticut) Water and Sewer Department for his talk entitled “Using Cyber Security Evaluation Tool (CSET) for a Wastewater Treatment Plant.” Dusza’s address examined the end-user experience of the recently released CSET in a plant environment. “It was great for the symposium attendees to hear how the CSET tool can be used in a plant environment,” says Graham Nasby, general symposium chair. “In his presentation Mr. Dusza provided important insights, from an end-user perspective, into some of the challenges of applying these tools that were particularly valuable to symposium attendees.”

Three other presentations also were recognized. They included: “Mobile Devices for SCADA Integration and Beyond: Considerations, Security and Applications” by Pavol Segedy of Brown & Caldwell and Brandon Erndt, which earned Second Place; “So You Have SCADA, What’s Next?” by Grant Van Hemert of Schneider Electric, which won Third Place; and “Asset Tracking and Revision Control for Automated Water/Wastewater Control Systems,” by Blair Sooley of Trihedral Engineering, which received Honorable Mention.

The WWAC Symposium added a new category this year for large-format, three-foot by four-foot posters. The large-format posters gave authors a new and more prominent way to present their work. First Place for Best Poster was awarded to Norman Anderson of CH2M HILL for his “Planning and Designing SCADA Systems for Wastewater Collection Optimization” poster. Event organizers plan to expand the large-format poster category at the 2013 WWAC Symposium.

Award winners from the 2012 WWAC Symposium will be officially recognized at the ISA Technical Divisions’ award luncheon, which will be held Sept. 25 in conjunction with ISA Automation Week in Orlando, Fla. For more information about ISA Automation Week and the ISA Technical Divisions’ awards luncheon, visit www.isaautomationweek.com.

More information about the 2013 ISA Water/Wastewater and Automatic Controls Symposium can be found at www.isawwsymposium.com. The 2013 WWAC Symposium is scheduled to take place Aug. 6-8, 2013 in Orlando. The 2013 call for abstracts is now available, and submissions are due in December 2012.