Scottish Water forms academic partnership to predict network faults

Scottish Water has formed a research partnership with the University of Strathclyde to develop new software to predict and find faults on its network before they happen.

The new monitoring system will help Scottish Water, and other utilities, cut repair bills by predicting faults before they occur by monitoring network data, including temperature, flow and pressure levels, according to the water company.

Scottish Water added the technology will help it to provide a better, more efficient service to its customers, be more proactive in its maintenance, and ensure that plant and equipment is meeting suppliers’ performance specifications.

Currently software is only able to monitor assets and alert the operator to a fault when it occurs or provide a generalised estimate of expected failures without fully combining the available data.

Scottish Water’s water operations north team manager, Robert White, said: “Prevention is always better than cure, and this piece of technology is going to act as an early warning system for potentially tens of thousands of our assets across the country.
“Planned repairs are normally significantly cheaper than replacements of the equivalent machine.”

He added: “This software has the potential to make proactive maintenance a much easier task.

“We will be in a position to schedule maintenance for when and where it is really needed, which will minimise asset downtime. We can then plan our resources more effectively.”

The partnership between Scottish Water and the University of Strathclyde’s centre for intelligent dynamic communications (CIDCOM), department of electronic and electrical engineering will start from September next year.

The Scottish Centre for Sensors and Imaging Systems (CENSIS), which aims to bring together commercial innovation and academic research in Scotland, contributed £50,000 towards the project.