What is SCADA, AMI, historians?
SCADA supervises and controls utility and plant networks, AMI collects interval reads from customer meters over a communications network, and a historian stores time-series data from these systems for analysis.
Who runs these systems
Water and wastewater utilities, electric and gas utilities, municipal networks, large campuses and process plants such as dairies run some mix of the three. SCADA links remote terminal units and PLCs at pump stations, reservoirs and substations to a control room; AMI replaces manual meter reading; the historian keeps years of tagged readings for engineers.
How widespread AMI is
Per the US Energy Information Administration, US electric utilities had about 119 million advanced metering infrastructure installations in 2022, about 72 percent of all electric meters. Interval reads at that coverage make customer-side analysis possible, but the reads still sit apart from SCADA flows and historian tags.
Balancing inflow against use
The question a utility or large campus needs answered is how much entering a zone is not accounted for. aQ WaterGuard's balance equation does this inside a site, with unaccounted loss as the residual term, and the same logic compares metered inflow to a district with the sum of customer reads. Aqueduct reads these systems; control of the network stays with SCADA and its operators.