Utility Week

38 | NOVEMBER 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Analysis AI puts 'eyes and ears' in the wastewater network Stuart Stone talks to United Utilities about its ground-breaking use of AI and machine learning to proactively monitor and maintain its 78,000km wastewater network. U nited Utilities' network serves seven million people across North West Eng- land. The length of its pipes is equiva- lent to four return flights between the UK and Australia, and the company has been spurred to embrace the latest technology to help it manage such a vast enterprise, a task it must accomplish while coping with the impacts of a growing population and climate change. The firm aims to invest £5.9 billion between 2020-25 upgrading its network and recently unveiled plans to employ real-time data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to process data and identify issues such as blockages and rising water in its sewer networks via what's known within the company as dynamic network management. The approach will see more than 19,000 sensors installed in manholes across the North West and will bolster the company's monitoring at both powered and non-powered sites. "Due to the vast nature of the waste water network, we oŠen don't know that there is an issue until it is experienced first-hand by our customers," says Mike Wood, United Utili- ties water and wastewater network director. "This is something we want to change. "Our aim is to move away from the tradi- tional reactive approach and address prob- lems proactively as much as possible, to ensure that we are managing the network, not the other way around. "We want visibility as to what is happen- ing on our wastewater network and when, so we can detect and prevent any unnecessary issues before they become a problem for cus- tomers or the environment," he adds. Getting ahead of operational incidents According to Samantha Sloan, United Utili- ties' network business manager and lead on dynamic network management, the 19,000- plus new units range from high-level trigger sensors to analogue sensors which feed data to a centrally managed cloud-based platform. "The sensors offer not just rise and fall in water levels or power changes in places such as pumping stations but also use AI to learn the trends and system performance, and more importantly pick up when there's any deviation from its experience of what is nor- mal for that particular location, so that we can schedule our teams to respond accord- ingly," she tells Utility Week Innovate. "This means we are able to get ahead of any operational incidents that could poten- tially have an impact on our customers, or the environment." As such, Sloan says the new system will illustrate the performance of United Utilities' sewer network and assets within the firm's drainage areas. "So the types of data that we'll be able to look at are things like the levels of the system, the pump performance, the hydraulic performance of the network

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