WET News

wwtonline.co.uk | APRIL 2019 WET NEWS 5 W hile the water sector has already made significant strides in the use of BIM for design and build, digital asset management could deliver more substantial benefits, and artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the technologies promising transformational approaches. How long the transformation will take remains uncertain but, with tech companies demonstrating that cutting- edge AI can be adapted for the water sector, the journey has already begun. NEW SOLUTIONS While the industry can gain real insights from the existing standards of instrumentation used to measure asset health, there is scope for improvement – instantly identifying when an asset has failed is not nearly so useful as accurately predicting that it is due to fail and being able to intervene. The opportunity to move from reactive to proactive approaches, and being able to understand an asset's role in a connected system, could be significant. "Everybody's trialling new non-destructive testing or measurement methods to look at asset health below ground, but we're seeing very few widespread, systematic solutions," SES Water innovation manager Jeremy Heath says. "We're really waiting for a lot more data to come through." Two key developments have the ability to facilitate change. The water sector is set to be hit with a surge of new data as the industry takes advantage of the superior, and more affordable, communication protocols offered by the Internet of Things (IoT) to install a raˆ of new sensors above and below ground. Smart thinking • With many of the pieces now in place for a digital asset management revolution, AI and machine learning solutions are set to have a significant impact throughout the sector By Robin Hackett However, more data creates its own problems. The Veritas Databerg Report 2015 for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) estimated that 54 per cent of stored data is 'dark', meaning no value is derived from it, and 32 per cent is 'ROT', meaning redundant, obsolete or trivial. The amount of data generated is also growing at a phenomenal rate – an IBM report in 2017 estimated that 90 per cent of the world's data had been created in the previous two years. Like most sectors, water is at risk of being overwhelmed. "There's a wonderful acronym for water companies," Heath says. "DRIP – data rich, information poor. Water companies are great at collecting loads of data and doing nothing spectacular with it. There's no point in getting data back if you can't process it." The solution to that could come with the implementation of AI and machine learning technologies, which have the ability to process and utilise vast amounts of data. These technologies will also allow companies to move beyond just descriptive analytics, which uses the data to understand past incidents and trends, to predictive analytics, which establishes what is likely to happen, and prescriptive analytics, which suggests actions on the basis of the predictions. A number of tech companies and universities that have developed such platforms are now looking to seize the opportunity in the water sector. "There's a lot of entrants that have never been associated with the water industry coming in because they have an AI engine and recognise the amount of data we've got," Heath says. "What we're seeing from the first demonstrations is that they're very good at looking at systems and working out whether they're working normally or not. "They will learn your particular system and how it operates, which is completely different from the old system of putting in an alarm and saying: 'If it goes above or below that level, send me an alert. If it's between the two, I'll assume it's fine.' With an AI solution, you can start to program exactly how that asset should operate." Hitachi is among the big- name companies to have identified an opportunity in the water market, but Canadian technology firm EMAGIN became the first to introduce large-scale artificial intelligence into the UK water sector late last year following a successful trial with United Utilities. "We see the market as ready for this," EMAGIN CEO and co-founder Thouheed Gaffoor says. "They're looking for new technology to optimise operations connected to some of the capital planning and have a more holistic approach." "I think the dawning realisation is that the real benefit of digital is when we take that project delivery digital footprint into the asset management phase and the operational phase" Andrew Cowell, BIM4Water IN FOCUS DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT

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