Water industry develops early warning software
15 Jan 2015
A data analysis solution for the water and wastewater industry could be applied across a variety of sectors, its developers say.
Utilities firm Scottish Water has joined forces with the University of Strathclyde and the Scottish Innovation Centre for Sensors and Imaging Systems (CENSIS) to develop software that monitors data from pumps and water meters, detecting any signals indicating a need for maintenance.
The software could be used by almost any business that uses a large number of machines which require maintenance
Senior researcher Alison Cleary
According to CENSIS, current comparable software either monitors assets or raises an alarm when a fault occurs, or provides generalised estimates of expected failures without taking into account the full effect of combining the available data streams.
This means that users can normally respond only after machines have stopped working, which results in maintenance work having to be reactive.
This can place pressure on resources, decrease efficiency and result in a reliance on back-up equipment, CENSIS said.
“Prevention is always better than cure, and this [new] piece of technology is going to act as an early warning system for potentially tens of thousands of our assets across the country,” said Robert White, water operations north team manager at Scottish Water.
“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.”
White said the software could also be used to monitor the performance of all the company’s assets at the same time to ensure each is operating to its correct specifications.
University of Strathclyde senior researcher Alison Cleary said: “The initiative could have a much wider application than monitoring water pumps. It could be used by other utilities to monitor the data produced by generators and a variety of other types of devices.
“The software could be used by almost any business that uses a large number of machines which require maintenance.”
