Jeremy Hidderley - AECOM & AGI Asset Management SIG
With ageing water
infrastructure and the move towards total expenditure regulation in AMP6, UK
water companies face tough decisions about how to spend their budgets most
effectively.
Combining these decisions with delivering outcomes rather
than outputs and increasing service demands from customers and the environment,
the emphasis is on delivering effective operational and asset management. To
help keep abreast of these challenges, the AGI’s Asset Management SIG is
hosting a water utilities seminar in Bristol on Tuesday 9th
September.
All water companies have recently submitted their PR14 business
plans to OFWAT. The next great challenge
will be applying asset management expertise to help translate these plans into
tangible benefits for their customers.
At the forefront of this challenge will be the need for accurate
and complete data, the lifeblood of effective asset management. The transfer in ownership of underground
assets since 2011 has made this requirement a greater issue as the householders
were the previous owners of the asset, and of course, very few formal records
were maintained.
Water companies are tackling these data issues either by
proactively mapping assets from paper records or predicting the number, length
and age of those assets using any available data. In addition to this, mobile mapping
technology has truly come of age with operatives now able to collect location
and attribute information in the field which can be returned to the corporate
GIS quickly and efficiently as certain attributes can be mandated during the
collection phase.
Wessex Water and Arup will be sharing their perspective on
some of these issues and how they are using geospatial technologies and
geographic information to solve them. South
West Water will be sharing their approach to fast and accurate asset data
collection with their new black-lining system.
In addition to the completeness and accuracy of data, the
volume and speed at which data is being created is increasing. Networks of sensors across water company
assets already provide a wealth of information about the performance of a
system. Further investment is still needed in this technology to increase
coverage, allowing the performance of whole catchments to be viewed at the
click of a button. This will help water companies move towards real-time
operational management, and even take this to the next level of self-learning
asset control. For example, if water companies could link the effect of
prevailing weather patterns to the need for additional network storage or a
temporary increase in wastewater treatment capacity this could increase
operational efficiency and reduce customer disruption.
By utilising this wealth of data that is (and could be)
available, the industry can start to build up a greater understanding about how
and when assets fail. In a similar
fashion to using weather and climate data to predict capacity requirements, the
industry can start to look more at the environment in which an asset resides.
On this subject, Cranfield University will be talking about some of their
research into the impact of soils upon underground assets. As we begin to better understand modes of
failure, the industry can begin to fine tune their predictive
capabilities.
