Anglian Water is the largest water and wastewater company in England and Wales. In its Water resources management plan for 2024, the company discusses the value of digital technologies to enable it to reduce water leaks.
The 2024 plan revises its water leak reduction targets to a 38% reduction by 2050.
In the document, Anglian Water says: “To achieve our ambition we will need to use innovative techniques, as well as tried and tested methods. Smart metering is currently offering an opportunity for a step change in detecting customer supply pipe (external) and plumbing loss (internal) leaks by improving our understanding of continuous flows in customer properties (usually indicating a leak), as well as increasing our overall understanding of our network.”
The company says it plans to use state-of-the-art technology to help it achieve further leakage reductions. “We continue to actively trial technologies such as thermal imaging drones to detect leaking pipes and the use of satellite imagery to identify leakage,” it writes.
Discussing the importance of smart technologies in supporting water management, Dave Martin, director for digital data and technology at Anglian Water, says: “If we look back over the last 15-18 months and then project forward into our next funding cycle, it’s very clear that technology will play a massive part in propelling us towards meeting our customer and environmental goals and strategies.”
What this involves for Martin is taking a different approach to technology. Rather than focusing on constructing the IT infrastructure required to support business initiatives, his goal is to make the technology function at Anglian Water “a vehicle for the empowerment of delivery teams across the organisation”.
This means instead of IT being responsible for the delivery of every piece of software the business requires, he says: “We can work with our business colleagues to continue to improve and increase their digital literacy and capabilities to then make sure they can get the most value from the data and technology by themselves.”
Digital opportunities
One of these areas is in the digital simulation of Anglain’s water network.
In 2023, Cambridge Consultants and Capgemini published a document looking at the role of technology integrations in the long-term delivery strategy for Anglian Water. This document, The final integrated technology scenario development report, noted that artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twin technologies offer the prospect of true operational transformation for Anglian Water and the water industry as a whole.
The report notes that AI could support a wide variety of applications requiring faster, more accurate, “human-like” analysis of large and disparate datasets, from developing deeper customer behavioural insight to optimising water networks for maximum efficiency.
In the report, Cambridge Consultants and Capgemini say effective AI adoption could drive efficiency and quality, informing decision-making and eventually providing autonomous functionality throughout the water network, and support safety and sustainability, helping the water network to become more adaptive and resilient. The report’s authors say that achieving these benefits requires changes to process and approach, as well as to IT and operational technology.
“Anglian Water must be ready to work in a more agile way to make best use of the insights and eventual autonomy that AI can deliver,” they write.
A digital representation of the water network
In the water sector, reducing downtime and maximising efficiency in customer service remain top priorities. While the sector is dedicated to improving the detection rate of pipe bursts in the network, addressing these issues can result in a lengthy process, often causing interruptions in water supply for customers.
Gary Copeman, senior optimisation engineer at Anglian Water, says the company currently runs a “digital representation” of its water network. “In theory, what we can do is, for example, assess [the plans] of a property developer, based on the number of properties they want to build, to understand what impact they might have to our network and whether we need to reinforce the section they’re connecting to or whether we have enough capacity to supply those properties,” he says. “We also put in details around pumping pressures, heights and levels of storage points.”
Anglian has embarked on an extended pressure monitoring programme which Copeman, adding more and more pressure monitors into the water network managed by Anglian Water.
“We’ve [therefore] got much more data, which gives us a greater understanding of what’s going on in,” he says.
Although presently pressure sensor data needs to be imported into the modelling software that runs in the water company’s control room, Copeman says Anglian Water uses an application called Qatium, which sits on top of the EPA’s US Environmental Protection Agency open source modelling application, to provide access to the model in the field.
The browser application presents technicians onsite at a water mains leak with the same information that is in the model in terms of flows and flow directions in the network, which, says Copeman, enables them to look at the network and understand what is actually happening.
As he explains, Qatium has helped the water company speed up the process of handling water leaks as it avoids the extra communications between the control room and on-site technician. “If one of our technicians was in the field and wanted to know information about the network, [previously] they would probably have to ring the control room and speak to a modeller,” says Copeman.
“This obviously delays things a little bit, particularly if there’s a problem. There’s mains-leaking and we’ve got customers who are affected. The software runs via a browser on the technician’s Samsung Galaxy Tab Active Pro 4 ruggedised tablet device. The actual model is in the cloud and negligible processing is done on the device itself.”
Evolving digital initiatives
Like many large organisations, making technology changes is something that takes time, given that, as Martin points out, certain ways of working are deeply embedded. Historically, the company pulled telemetry data into a traditional enterprise system, which eventually generates a series of alarms when a threshold triggers it.
But in parallel to this way of working, he says the company has been building out a common data environment for sensor telemetry data and corporate data. “We continue to modernise a large technology landscape,” says Martin. “Core IT becomes the mechanism by which we then pull all of that data together, ingest and curate it.”
Providing access in the field to the same data as the digital simulation is one example of how this strategy is helping Anglian Water improve operational efficiency. As the technology capabilities broaden over time, he plans to offer greater levels of analytics and visualisation tools.