New partnership uses AI to bolster efficiency, cybersecurity for water treatment | Virginia Tech News

In April, Batarseh’s team presented its first round of results to AlexRenew. Unlike many other industries, utilities like AlexRenew are excited to share their data, as the more information the models can process, the better job they can do of predicting fluctuations from baseline expectations in advance.

“We’ve always had this collaborative nature, and the industry itself is very collaborative,” said David Roberts, chief information technology officer for AlexRenew. “What we would normally keep to ourselves as a competitive advantage, to other companies and how to compete, is given away freely in this industry.”

This will be even more true in the future, as AlexRenew has offered the ACWA lab real-time data moving forward. That’s a huge boon for Batarseh and his students, as well as for the utility.

“AI is absolutely a perfect use case for what we do,” Roberts said. “Because AI looks for patterns. It’s great for looking at patterns across large data sets, and that’s exactly what we have.”

Utilities like water treatment plants — and, for that matter, power plants — mainly rely on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems to monitor outputs. SCADA systems are very good at telling you what’s happening within a plant right now. But they can’t anticipate a heavy rainfall, or a spike in usage, or a security breach, because they simply aren’t built to do so. One technological piece that Batarseh’s team is using employs AI to create predictive baselines to help fill that gap.

Implementing a GAN, or a generative adversarial network, creates scenarios to simulate what a hacked data set would look like, providing baselines that you normally would not have until after an attack had happened. By doing so, Batarseh’s team can allow a plant to identify a specific anomaly as it happens, so that they can deploy the right response immediately.

“These are not machine learning algorithms, meaning they are not forecasting just based on the data,” Batarseh said. “They are deep learning algorithms, meaning that they create more data and latent representations. They infer knowledge that the algorithm now has about this domain.”

In order to protect each of these interconnected systems, one has to be able to analyze and manage the threats to all of them. The hardware of the SCADA systems at AlexRenew are also all siloed, which is a necessary security measure. That way, if one part of the system gets compromised, it is quarantined, so it doesn’t bring down the entire plant. However, that also means that data is siloed, making diagnosing a problem somewhere in the system a real challenge, unless you’re looking right at it.

“If (a technician) gets a number there that’s inaccurate, he’s not going to know, sitting in a room,” Batarseh said. “Two buildings away, is where that thing is. So unless he walks away, he doesn’t know. And even if he walks there, he doesn’t know if the sensor is working correctly.”

The tools that Batarseh’s team brings help tie all that data together, allowing the system to instantly notify a technician as soon as any part of the system starts to stray from its expected baselines. Those extra layers of cybersecurity at small and mid-sized plants often aren’t in place because they’re expensive. Adding a soft censor system could help those municipalities mitigate costs while shoring up potential vulnerabilities.

Having a second set of data now from Alexandria, to go along with that from D.C., gives the ACWA Lab’s models that much more ability to learn under different environments. With each new data set comes better predictive capability, something Batarseh hopes will help their work spread to similar facilities around the country.

“ACWA Lab could be used to simulate wastewater facilities across the country,” he said, offering an open invitation for collaboration. “Whoever wants to go to Blacksburg to run a simulation, we’re happy to work with them on that.”

Feras Batarseh will be the featured speaker at Tech on Tap at Port City Brewing Company in Alexandria on Thursday, May 30, at 6 p.m. Reserve your tickets.