At a glance
Scottish Water partnered with Eviden, a part of the Atos Group, to upgrade its wastewater network — from deploying smart sensors to providing real time insights such as early warnings, reducing environmental and customer impact from chokes and pollution incidents. This collaborative project has evolved into machine learning approaches to maximize predictive capabilities and the value of real-time data.
Outcomes
- Real-time wastewater network monitoring
- Ability to detect, respond and prevent incidents quickly
- Reduction in environmental pollution events and a decreased impact on customers
- Improved data outputs to align with Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA)
- Operational resilience with future flow predictions
Scottish Water provides drinking water to 2.46 million households and 150,000 business customers across Scotland. It supplies 1.34 billion liters of drinking water and removes 847 million liters of wastewater from customer properties daily, treating it before returning it to the environment.
Scottish Water is embarking on transforming its operations by creating an intelligent asset base, which represents a new capability to predict and prevent issues in both water and wastewater areas before they impact customers and the environment.
Navigating through challenging waters
Treating and delivering water for more than 2 million customers is an incredible task, especially in the face of rising environmental issues. In recent years, Scottish Water has witnessed the rate of climate change and its significant impact on the environment and customer lives with environmental pollution incidents and sewer chokes.
Scottish Water understood that moving to a proactive and predictive approach would transform how it manages the wastewater network. The utility would have real-time insights, allowing them to schedule interventions rather than just respond to events, avoiding customer inconvenience and environmental impact.
Transitioning to a smart sewer network and utilizing real-time data insights would give the utility provider control to reduce the risk of flooding and pollution incidents with real-time event notifications. Additionally, this would help Scottish Water to align with statutory regulations from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). Eager to overhaul its wastewater network management systems to align with eco-friendly environmental mandates, Scottish Water selected Eviden as its partner for the Wastewater Intelligent Network (WWIN) project.
Why Eviden
Eviden’s smart water management solution
Eviden combines technology and industry expertise to deliver solutions for utilities across the globe — transforming water treatment and supply networks, reducing leakages, avoiding supply interruptions, improving customer experience and extending the life cycle of assets.
Learn how smart water management from Eviden can create a more sustainable water network and advance your net-zero journey.
The smart choice with Eviden’s wastewater management solution
Building on a longstanding partnership, Scottish Water leveraged Eviden’s expertise in the utility sector and digital transformation skills to deliver this project. One of the key suggestions from Eviden was to maximize the value of an intelligent network by targeting areas for the most beneficial deployment. The installation required a phased roll-out of intelligent network technology and leveraging data from business information modelling to assign resources effectively.
Eviden was chosen as the lead partner to implement the end-to-end wastewater management project. A third-party professional services firm was initially engaged for the physical installation, field validation and configuration. Eviden also arranged the procurement and selection of the level and flow sensors in the pilot phase. Last but far from least, Eviden provided the necessary cloud integrations, system architecture, built environment and associated data processing and visualization.
The first phase included several activities that played a pivotal role in transforming Scottish Water’s wastewater network management:
- Establishing a strong data collection infrastructure by selecting advanced IoT sensor technology to ensure secure, uninterrupted data capture
- Managing the installation of IoT sensors
- Delivering a robust, secure and scalable data platform that receives data from the installed sensors in the network, routes and processes it, and raises necessary notifications or alarms to any abnormal behavior
- Extracting data insights from the IoT platform to populate dashboards, reports and future predictive models, as well as analytics to understand and maintain normal operations
- Managing day-to-day operations to ensure seamless functioning, and maintain or handle any changes
The six-month pilot phase involved the rollout of nearly 300 sensors at four Drainage Operation Areas (DOAs), and the implementation of an IoT platform, data analytics and visualizations. Real-time insights from the sensors, dashboards and timely reports were instrumental in quicker deployments and clean-ups in those areas prone to flooding and choking, thereby reducing the number of incidents following the pilot phase.
In the second phase, December 2022 to August 2024, the solution will be scaled up to ensure that nearly 3,000 sensors are deployed across Scotland with increased capabilities added to the platform. This includes integration with existing telemetry data and the introduction of enhanced artificial intelligence and machine learning. Eviden will also support the people and process change management that will be needed to transfer the intelligent network into business as usual.
A customer-driven and environment-focused approach with a successful outcome
The solution has positively impacted Scottish Water, its end customers and the environment, delivering results such as:
- The ability to detect, respond and mitigate incidents quickly, with accurate real-time insights to proactively manage the wastewater network
- An enhanced monitoring network around Scottish Water’s bathing waters
- Reduced environmental pollution events from the network
- Increased compliance with Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA)
In addition, the project has led to a decrease in environmental pollution events from the network, as well as the number of customers impacted by incidents such as flooded sewers.
Among the early successes of the WWIN solution, a noteworthy one occurred in early July 2022. The level monitor within the drainage area showed a significant increase and raised an alarm via the dashboard, triggering a notification to the response team. There was a communication fault with the pumping station, but the control room was unaware that the pumps had failed. The platform ensured that the problem was clearly identified, and action was taken to repair the pumps and prevent any release into sensitive bathing water.
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