nvironmental Monitoring Solutions Pty. Ltd. (EMS) is an Australian company helping pet. tanks. The European Environment Agency estimated in 2014 that there may be as many as 2.5 million rol station owners to manage their operations, potentially contaminated sites across Europe need- specifically around fuel supply and storage. When a ing investigation, meaning up to 250,000 cases might person in Australia drives into a petrol station and be due to petrol storage. In the United States, for the fills up their car, the process usually appears pretty year ending September 2018, over 5,600 confirmed simple and seamless: they fill their tank and walk in underground petrol tank leaks were recorded by the to pay, and the operator has a console showing how U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in just one much fuel was pumped and can charge the customer year, with the cumulative total for the past 30 years accordingly. Behind the scenes, however, the pro- being over half a million. The true cost of leaking cesses are much more complex. fuel is not just to the service station owner's bank Petrol stations often run a variety of different balance, but to the environment. hardware and software platforms, and some of them The financial cost of repairing a leaking under- can be quite old by today's standards. There might ground petrol tank and remediating contaminated be one information system for tracking the amount soil is also significant-it can easily exceed $100,000 of fuel dispensed per pump, another to track the for just one leaking tank, and the petrol station's fuel amount of fuel remaining in the large underground operations would typically be closed for at least three tanks, and a third to manage the point-of-sale trans- weeks, meaning loss of revenue on top of the cost actions. In a typical petrol station, these would prob- of repair and remediation. It makes good business ably not be integrated, making it almost impossible sense as well as good environmental sense to pre- for an owner to get a snapshot of how much fuel vent such leaks from occurring in the first place. they have in stock at any moment in time or to com- Environmental Monitoring Solutions has been pare fuel sales against the amount in the tanks. providing technology to help the fuel industry, in- Further, it is not unusual for there to be discrepan cluding large fuel operators in the Asia-Pacific re- cies between the different information systems. If gion, manage their stock for over 25 years, with a the level of the underground fuel tanks (according particular focus on environmental impact. The key to the inventory management system) seems to be to their work on detecting leaks is a widely used decreasing at a faster rate than the amount of fuel technique called statistical inventory reconciliation sold (according to the point-of-sale system), what (SIR). With traditional SIR, the petrol station operator does it mean? Is there a fault in measuring the stock takes daily opening and closing measurements of the remaining in the underground fuel tank? Is there volume of fuel in the tanks, which may be as simple a faulty pump that is dispensing more fuel to the as using a gauge stick physically inserted into the customer than they are paying for? Could one of the tank or may involve an automatic tank gauge (ATG) petrol station attendants be giving away free fuel to that measures the level of fuel and reports back to a their friends by undercharging them? Or worse, is console. This volume of fuel in each tank is collated there a leak in the underground tank, meaning that with the daily sales volume and any deliveries that petrol is leaking into the soil and contaminating the have arrived, then provided as input to a computer nearby groundwater? In the state of New South Wales in Australia, as of program that runs a statistical analysis on the data December 2018, over a thousand petrol stations and over a period of time-at least a month-to identify other petroleum storage facilities were reported to unexplained variations. the NSW Environmental Protection Authority as po- However, leak detection is just one part of the tentially contaminated sites, most likely from leaking overall petrol station operation. A leak detection underground fuel tanks. But if you think that's a lot, system using SIR software still cannot tell you if the in Europe, around 10 percent of all soil contamina- pumps are not properly calibrated or are delivering tion relates to storage, including underground petrol too much or too little fuel-nor will it tell you if there is an employee that is undercharging customers. Butrecent products developed by EMS together with their technology partner DiUS use the Internet of Things and the cloud to bring petrol station manage- ment into the modern era and put more data than ever before at the business owner's ngertips. Fuelsuite is an information system that provides petrol station owners with a complete view of opera- tions, from tank levels to sales reports and even the pressure inside the hoses that carry the fuel. The aim is to support better decision-making by petrol station owners and to enable them to manage their operations proactively rather than reactively. Fuelsuite stores data in the cloud, hosted on the Amazon AWS cloud platform. This enables remote management, with owners able to keep track of what's happening on site from anywhere in the world. Moreover, companies often own multiple pet- rol station sitessometimes hundredsso Fuelsuite allows them to aggregate data from multiple sites and see warnings or alerts that need the most urgent attention. Although Fuelsuite can work with pro-existing systems, like automatic tank gauges, to get near real- time data, they have developed a companion product called Fuelscan, an IoT hardware device that col- lects data from tank sensors to ascertain how much fuel remains and listens in to the electric circuit that connects the fuel pumps to know when a pump is dispensing fuel and when pumps are on- or ofine. It can also connect to the point-of-sale system and the electronic sign boards that display petrol prices. In the future, it may connect with electric vehicle charging stations and other kinds of devices at the petrol station that generate data. Fuelscan collects this data every 30 seconds and sends it over a cellu- lar data network to the cloud, where it can be stored and processed by the Fuelsuite information system. This information system gives petrol station own- ers an almost real-time view of what's happening at each station. They can see if stock of a particular type of fuel is running low or if a particular pump is malfunctioning and has been taken offline. If there is a malfunction, they can pinpoint the problem before calling a technician, saving time and avoid- in g wasted callouts. They can see how much fuel is being dispensed and at what price, so they can spot any discrepancies between the sales records and the stock levels. And importantly, if there are any dis- crcpancics in fuel stack levels that might be caused h}, leaking fuel tankS. these can be identied 'much sooner and action taken more promptly 1 prevent environmental disasters. . Overall, Fuelsuite greatly improves information quality, specically the dimensions of information accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and accessibil- . ity. This improvement in information quality alone can lead to improved business decisions, but now __ that the information is being constantly collected ' and stored in a common platform, it opens up the possibility of incorporating business intelligence and analytics. Fuelsuite already includes a dashboard view for Owners to see the perfOrmance of their busi- ness at a glance. The dashboards can show'alerts, tank levels, pumps that are out of service, sales data, and more. The data can be aggregated by loca- tion and show historical values over time. Analytics - algorithms can be applied to the data to highlight trends over time or to identify patterns in particular : locations. .. - ' But when Fudscan is combined with Fuelsuite,.- -- the possibilities grow even further. With data being collected every 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, from . . - . multiple sensors in each of potentially hundreds of petrol stations for a single owning company, EMS is now working with big data. Not Only can each petrol station owner access more data about their opera- tions than ever before, but EMS also has the ability to aggregate the data by operator, location, time period, and other attributes to produce detailed reports or identify trends in the data. The next stage is predictive analytics, and EMS are already exploring what can be done in this area. By applying statistical analysis to historical data, Fuelsuite can help petrol station owners forecast future events. Data on how often different pumps are out of order can be used to come up with a main tenance plan that predicts when a pump is likely to fail and to schedule maintenance in advance, avoid- ing downtime. It can also use data on fuel sales at different times of the year to predict peak periods of demand in different suburbs and order more fre- quent deliveries of fuel to ensure the tanks don't run out. The system enables proactive management, pre- dicting and preventing negative events before they occur. Through Fuelsuite, petrol station owners have ac- cess to much greater information about their sites' operations, and more importantly, it is integrated into a single platform, enabling enhanced decision making. In the future, it could even be used for oper- ational intelligence, enabling petrol stations to detect probable leaks from pumps or tanks and shut down services automatically to prevent loss and potential CASE STUDY QUESTIONS environmental damage, and to detect when water 12-13 Fuelsuite improves information accuracy, sitting at the bottom of an underground fuel tank is completeness, timeliness, and accessibility. about to be pumped into a customer's vehicle, allow- For each of these dimensions of information ing them to shut down the pump before it happens, quality, describe how Fuelsuite improves avoiding costly insurance claims and, of course, un- that dimension. happy customers. 12-14 Other than the petrol station owners, think of two other decision-makers who might be Sources: "Enabling Service Stations to Keep Stock of Fuel," IoT Hub, able to use the data collected by FuelSuite June 5, 2018; P. Peter Gutierrez, "Using IoT to Unify Petrol Station for improving decision making, and explain Management," IoT Hub, April 7, 2017; B. Howarth, "2018 CRN how. Impact Awards: DiUS and Environmental Monitoring Solutions," crn.com.au, May 2018;; R. Dupuy, "Has Your Fuel Been Stolen, or 12-15 With Fuelscan as an example, what impact Just Lost? Understanding Your Losses with a Fuel Management does the Internet of Things have upon the System," drivingfueliq.com, December 5, 2018; New South Wales information available for decision making, Environmental Protection Authority, "List of Contaminated Sites and what is needed to realise its potential? Notified to the EPA," epa.now.gov.au, accessed December 14, 2018; 12-16 Imagine that Fuelsuite has decided to incor- European Environment Agency, "Soil Contamination Widespread in Europe," eea.europa.eu, May 2014; United States Environmental porate some operational intelligence and au- Protection Agency, "Semiannual Report of UST Performance tomated decision making. What are some ex- Measures - End of Fiscal Year 2018," epa.gov, November 2018. amples of how this could be used, and what Buildi M are the risks in doing this? Case contributed by Wayne Brookes, University of Technology Sydney