Autonomous water Treatment systems still Need Humans

摘要

Remote monitoring of water treatment creates efficiency by letting a few people monitor whole fields. When the digital oil field arrives, which it really already has, there will still be a significant human component, at least for the foreseeable future. While artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can process huge amounts of data to make operational decisions (e.g., detecting a full tank and shutting off a pump or rerouting its flow), many of those decisions involve weighing too many and often subjective priorities to be left to AI and machine learning alone. What these ever-growing digital tools can do, however, is allow a small number of humans at monitoring centers to track dozens of wells across hundreds of miles of remote landscape, deploying additional resources only when there is a perceived problem detected by this human-machine operations team.