When the lights go up at SoFi Stadium or a plane lifts off from LAX, water is probably the last thing on anyone’s mind. But behind some of Southern California’s most iconic venues, busiest infrastructure, and critical industries, West Basin Municipal Water District is quietly doing one of the most important jobs in the region.
West Basin has spent nearly 80 years delivering high-quality water to coastal Los Angeles communities. At the center of that work is the Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility in El Segundo, the largest of its kind in the United States. It produces 30 to 40 million gallons of up to 80,000 households annually, delivered through a distribution network stretching more than 100 miles with over 500 connections.
West Basin’s customers span the full range of what keeps Southern California running, from major entertainment venues to military bases to LAX. With the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, West Basin’s recycled water will support the region’s biggest moment on the world stage. Over $750 million in local, state, and federal funds have been invested in this effort, and for good reason.
West Basin runs an advanced recycled water operation, producing five types of fit-for-purpose recycled water for nearly 600 customer sites. The control system steering it had served them well since the early 1990s, but three decades is a long run for any platform. West Basin recognized that the Ovation distributed control system was reaching the limits of what it could realistically support.
Replacement controllers were running as high as $40,000 each, and service calls to the sole vendor capable of working on the system could take up to six weeks. Process and historical data lived inside the Ovation environment, out of reach of modern analytics tools. And as cybersecurity threats to water utilities have grown more sophisticated nationwide, an aging platform presented a risk West Basin was right to take seriously.
The MOSAIC project, which stands for Modernized Operational Security and Automation Integrated Control, was their answer: replace a proprietary, single-vendor system with something open, well-supported, and built to carry their operations through the next several decades.
Enterprise Automation came onto the MOSAIC project as the prime contractor owning the architecture of the solution.
The work started with documentation. EA developed detailed control narratives that captured the operating logic inside West Basin’s existing Ovation controllers. Getting this right was essential to fully understand the system and its operations.
EA also architected the vendor evaluation process, building the scoring rubric and comparative analysis that guided West Basin through selecting a new platform. After evaluating multiple options, West Basin selected Schneider Electric’s open control architecture, built on Modicon M580 PLCs, AVEVA System Platform, and AVEVA PI. The decision came down to pricing, native protocol support, a credible migration approach, and a clear path toward AI-driven optimization in the future.
With a platform selected, EA led system design and built a project-specific suite of standards covering instrumentation, controls, electrical design, and cybersecurity governance, including change control and system management documentation. These were not vendor defaults adapted to fit the situation. They were built from the ground up for West Basin’s environment.
On a traditional distributed control system like Ovation, engineers work within the constraints of what the vendor’s software allows. Custom standards flip that. Where a vendor-provided standard might include a hundred configuration options to account for every possible scenario across every possible client, a tailored standard is built for one environment specifically, which might bring that number down to fifteen. That kind of efficiency makes development faster, makes the system easier to operate, and most importantly for West Basin, makes it something their own team can manage and build on without calling a vendor on the other side of the country.
After decades of dependency on a single proprietary vendor, West Basin’s in-house team now has the foundation to develop, evolve, and maintain their own system.
EA subcontracted and collaborated closely with RoviSys throughout execution. RoviSys brought strong experience with the legacy Ovation platform and conducted the onsite assessment, while EA’s documentation and design standards ensured alignment across the team.
The new architecture gives operators clear, consistent SCADA screens across 19 process areas and replaces the old black-box data model with real-time, contextualized visibility across the entire facility. Running on Modicon M580 controllers, AVEVA System Platform, and AVEVA PI, it also lays the data infrastructure for future AI-driven optimization.
The redesigned OT network is built around a simple principle: no single failure should be able to bring everything down. The foundation is a two-hop IDMZ (industrial DMZ), which means no traffic can pass directly between the outside world and West Basin’s control network in a single connection. Every inbound or outbound communication routes through proxy services inside a dedicated buffer zone, so even an authenticated user has to clear two separate, controlled checkpoints to reach anything critical. Multi-factor authentication is configured to fail closed: if the authentication system goes offline for any reason, access is blocked rather than opened. And if the worst happens, West Basin’s OT backup environment runs as a fully independent instance separate from the enterprise backup platform, with each remote site maintaining enough local historian capacity to sustain at least 30 days of operations through a network area failure.
On the cost side, West Basin expects annual control system maintenance spend to drop from roughly $2 million to $500,000 or less. And because the new platform is open and supported by multiple qualified integrators, West Basin is no longer dependent on any single vendor for support or development.
The MOSAIC project began in June 2025, with full deployment expected in early 2028. When it’s complete, the infrastructure that keeps Southern California’s water supply reliable, secure, and ready for the next 30 years will look very different from the one it replaced.