A Requisite Water Main System Solution for Water-dependent Cities

Use Case / Water Main System

About

Water is considered the most important substance on earth because it is the lifeblood flowing through all plants and animals to help them survive and sustain life. This is why potable water distribution is considered as a critical and painstaking responsibility by water utility service enabling bodies anywhere in the world. With the surging population and urbanisation rates, the need for clean and reliable water utility services cannot be emphasised enough. Water system maintenance and management are challenged with climatic changes and economic constraints that are putting authorities on a hot spot when investing lots of money in water infrastructures.

The Water Infrastructure Systems are giant asset-heavy networks, and they can be categorised into a top-down flow of 4 main areas from the catchment to the water consumer’s tap:

  1. Catchment of Surface Level Water
  2. Treatment of Distilled Water
  3. Distribution of Water to Bulk Water Repositories
  4. Reticulation of Water Mainlines

Many Water Infrastructure Systems are manoeuvred by asset managers and leadership teams of City Councils, Municipal Councils, Waterboards and Governmental Departments in charge of water, agriculture, health, environment, labour and social security. Conventionally, the existing solutions are legacy systems that are confined to many disadvantages and inconveniences. These governmental, administering and managerial entities are impacted by the efficiency and effectiveness of the fourth and the last most vital aspect of the Water Main Infrastructure Systems: Reticulation of Water Mainlines.

What is a Water Main System?

Water Main System which is also known as Water Distribution Network, is a hydraulic architecture that reticulates assets to supply potable water to all taps and other devices that draws water to end-consumers. This network connects the water towers or tanks to commercial, residential and industrial water consumers who draw water to suffice their needs. Water Main Systems must constantly meet the quality standards and meet the demands in real-time with the right pressure, which makes Water Main Systems very difficult to manage since it is an accumulation of an intricate asset spread. This system is deemed to be efficient when it manages to maintain sufficient flow rates of potable water at every take-off point without any delay. A failure in the Water Main System can, unfortunately, meet fatal aftereffects even if failed for a few minutes, for example, fire fighting water flows must have a continuous flow of water if the Water Main System fails to meet the demands in serious fire accidents or bushfires, the results can be dreadful

Why is managing Water Main Systems challenging for legacy systems?

Most legacy systems use static age-based asset degradation schemas to calculate the devaluation of asset functionalities; this can inappropriately deviate the asset managers from determining the actual asset conditions. For example, if all the depreciation of pipelines networked in your Water Main System is evaluated using a general lambda expression, you will be overlooking a range of impactful and dynamic parametric readings that abates the actual conditions of your pipelines like different pipe materials, inexorable decay rates, different shapes and densities of pipes, environmental and geological impacts on pipelines and much more.

Secondly, the reticulation of water mains can be complex and span between 2500 to 3500 kilometres. Therefore, a legacy system would take ages to calculate water flow rates and pressures to identify vague coordinates to can barely pinpoint pipe breakages of anomalies that can waste gallons of water by then.

There are many incidents where legacy systems fail in sufficing the critical demands of Water Main System Managers, like:

  • Inability to create predictive models to monitor and determine impending asset failures and risks before the occurrence
  • Inability to proactively discover root causes for water main breakages
  • Insufficient data to develop water main life cycle strategies
  • Not enabling enough information for asset managers to pinpoint requirements in managing and maintaining water mainlines
  • The lateness in retrieving comprehensive and scalable asset profiles and many more other disfavours.

The targets that are not met by retro-fitting asset systems of the Water Utility Industry can be summated to three points, which are not being capable of:

  • Making mandated asset decisions proactively
  • Resolving uncertainties and discovering root causes for asset failures
  • Pre-planning resourceful investment profiles
The Ambit of our Use Case

This use case will help the reader understand how Tigernix Water Asset Solution- Australia’s Most Unrivalled Smart Asset Solution for Water Utility Service Enablers- the finest Enterprise Asset Management System- assisted a well-reputed client and an aspiring public governing body in Australia to mitigate their efforts and decision-making processes in managing and maintaining their Water Main Systems. As city councils, private and public water utility service enablers and governmental bureaus and authorities are constantly persuaded to maintain water quality and keep up to the demands of urban cities, they are compelled to take crucial social responsibilities and meet the interests of their communities. Hence, most of these clients entrusted Tigernix as their best Software Solution Enabler to help them face dynamic water distribution events and execute the best initiatives in improving the quality of potable water and their service levels simultaneously by managing their Water Main Networks confidently.

An experienced asset team manager, and proficient project and maintenance engineer estimated that the average statistics of their Water Main System are as follows:
The number of assets that a Water Main System managing organisation must simultaneously and constantly monitor
25,000 - 35,000 Assets Pieces (spanning from a variety of sizes, materials, densities and more)
The cumulative length of the Water Main Pipelines
It can normally span between 2,500 to 3,500 kilometres
The cost of establishing the asset pieces (without maintenance and expansion costs)
720,000,000 to 957,600,000 dollars
The number of people that can be served by a Water Main System
Over 200,000 people

Our client entrusted the proprietary asset-centric solution of Tigernix to enable top-notch water distribution services in Australia with the right AI-empowered machine learning (ML) models, other technological features and modules to manage Water Main Assets and execute financial decisions without any hesitation. Tigernix was chosen by the client city council with the intention of capturing insightful information that can answer numerous asset management success-oriented questions; a few are:

  • Are the maintenance service teams available at a given moment?
  • Are the maintenance strategies of the team resourceful and timely?
  • Are the parametric readings of the system up to the desired standards?
  • How to detect substandard Water Main Performance?
  • How to tailor the best Investment Profiles- user-based or AI-based?
  • Is the Water Main System invariably meeting the service quality level standards?
  • What are the critical assets of the Water Main System?
  • What is the funding strategy for the next year or the next decade?
  • What is the performance and reliability level of the whole or part of the Water Main System?
  • What is the probability of pipeline failures for the next decade, and how to overcome them?
  • What is the real value of service?
  • What prompts different pipelines to deteriorate at different paces?

Problem

There are many constraints that limit the chances of managing and maintaining Water Main Systems effortlessly. There is a range of problems that handicaps the authorities and direct managers and administrators in charge of the Water Main System because of many impacts that they are unable to respond to within the right time in the right way. Here are some of the problems faced by the governing bodies of Water Main Systems in the Water Utility Industry.

Stakeholder Engagement
There are many stakeholders who are related to the water distribution systems like mayors, ministers, consumers, asset managers, leadership teams, CEOs, directors and many more. In the context of reticulating water main networks, many stakeholders are entrusted with different responsibilities and challenged by different limitations too. One of the biggest restraints in managing and maintaining Water Main Systems is the unavailability of collaboration between stakeholder engagement because their interactions are constrained by monolithic information systems. If all the stakeholders of the Water Main System have shared and controlled access to the information and statistics of the water distribution patterns, they would gain more power in making faster and result-oriented decisions.

Unavailability of Required Asset Information
The limitations of this aspect are definitely the most severe problems faced by the asset custodians and Water Main System stakeholders that are directly impacted by water main utilisation and maintenance. With the lack of required information, asset maintenance fails to identify failures and tends to replace or repair assets with menial financial decisions. This leads to unresourceful operational expenses that will waste a lot of time, effort and money of your teams. Secondly, the inability to retrieve real-time and scientifically proven data will result in suffering from asset breakdowns and suboptimal asset performances because you will be unable to retrieve information about actual asset conditions, explore asset requirements and pre-determine the required budgets. This will also lead your team astray since they will deviate from the reality of Water Main Systems and be alienated from important parametric readings like asset degradation rates, asset risk prediction and iteration times, water cycles changes, price changes and dynamic demands.

  • Unflattening Quality of Service Impacts
  • Spontaneous Disruptions
  • Overbudgetted Repair and other Service Costs
  • Failed Operational Efforts
  • Inability to pre-plan budgets
  • Incompetency in capitalising real-time asset data

External Influences
There is a range of impacts that are rooting in economic, cultural and social domains too. These impacts must be acknowledged and mitigated to successfully distribute water without detrimental aftereffects. Many Water Main Systems must understand and quantify the public water consumption rates, health standards, environmental hazards, signature cultures and much other information when determining the nature of water supply in target areas. Especially if the Water Main System faces an expensive surprise breakdown, the severity of these impacts rises. This factor may include:

  • Expensive Damage Control Compensations
  • Long-term Socio-Economic Impacts
  • Natural Disasters and unforgiving climatic changes
  • Ad-lib water demand upsurges
  • Fire breakouts
Legal and Regulatory

Water Laws and Regulations

The water resource management efforts made by the Australian Government to ensure a continuous supply of water, especially to the dry areas due to climatic changes, are legally communicated by the Water Act 2007 and mission-oriented agendas like the National Water Initiative. It is important that the water utility service enablers are keenly aware of such initiatives and other laws: Water Regulations 2008 and Water Efficiency Labelling and Standards Act 2005, and water charge and water market rules, respectively. Furthermore, there are guidelines that must be followed by the key stakeholders of the Water Main System to ensure that the water quality standards are met by following the ”values, targets and actions in these guidelines”.

Water Main System Regulatory Standards

The ISO or ‘International Standards Organisation’ pioneered in tailoring the ISO 5500X Asset Management Suite in 2014, with three subcategories: ISO 55000, ISO 55001 and ISO 55002. These standards redefined the importance of asset management and set golden standards that ensure that assets are managed and maintained to exploit their fullest functionalities. As the Water Main Systems is shrouded with hundreds of thousands of assets, it is important that the asset managers are determined in meeting the Asset Management Standards rather than overlooking the importance of asset management, especially in an asset-dependent domain like the Water Utility Industry.

Solution

  • Tigernix was propelled to help the client city council’s asset managers and leadership teams to overcome all the problems and answer all questions related to the Water Main System when asset failures and risks are still impending. Tigernix tailored Tigernix Water Asset Solution to fit the asset management demands of the client city council. A few most promising features that were found extremely useful by these out-of-the-box solutions were their capability to:

  • Capitalise real-time water main data
  • Capture precise asset financial data
  • Gain advanced real-time simulated predictive analytics power
  • Gain information to engineer asset infrastructures for optimal asset utilisation
  • Manage materials and inventory to dispel all delays in maintenance programs
  • Monitor asset performances and remain lifecycles
  • Predict asset risks, failures, delays and suboptimal performances
  • Remain obliged to all compliance (Asset Data Security Laws, City Council Laws, Water and Environment Laws, Asset Management Standards)
  • Report asset behaviours, maintenance routines and investments effortlessly
  • Schedule asset maintenance programs efficiently
  • Tailor risk control protocols before risk occurrence
  • Tailor user-defined asset failure and risk models, asset degradation models and service availability models that are empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ML technologies
  • Visualise the decay and risk patterns of the assets in the Water Main System
Three main functions of Water Main System Managers empowered by This Tigernix Solutions
1. Asset Cost Mitigation

Investment Profiling
Tigernix Water Asset Solution played prominent role in tailoring budget plans and investment profiles that help asset managers in charge of the Water Main Systems to envision future asset-centric investments. This solution allows both AI-based investment profiling and user-defined asset investment profiling modules that enable the financial decision-makers to transparently view scientifically proven investment information for the next 10 years. The profiles will comprehensively allow users to get historical, current year and even predict the future capital expenses (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX) of each fiscal year with scientifically proven data.

Proactive Financial Decision Making
The shared access to financial information enabled by Tigernix Water Asset Solution gives insights into making abrupt financial decisions and allows asset custodians to request funds within the pre-designed financial scopes. This will restrain financial budget planners to over-budget or under-budget asset maintenance and replacement actions and make essential financial decisions while discarding all dispensable and unresourceful expenditures. Spontaneous financial decision making will be guided with the best financial plans and options, and the decision based can execute decisions the way they like to maintain favourable cost:quality ratios.

Shared Access to Financial Information
Key stakeholders of the Water Infrastructure System will be able to filter out the financial information confined to the Water Main System. For example, mayors, ministers and CEOs can scale out the financial information of the Water Main System of a certain city and check whether the asset managers and other leadership teams are appropriately capitalising on the funds that they provide. This dispels the mismanagement and exploitation of funds by the lower level fund utilising teams.

2. Asset Performance Upheavals

Multi-parametric Asset Condition Metres
Compared to outdated age-based asset lifespan trackers, Tigernix is lightyears ahead! Tigernix Water Asset Solution uses AI-powered models and user-defined algorithms that allows the managers to understand asset conditions based on their actual parametric impacts, like humidity levels, corroding rates, densities, materials, pipe diameters, and all other environmental, geographical, climatic and natural impacts that affect the degradation patterns of various mainlines in the Water Main Systems. Understanding the actual conditions pipelines of your systems will help you to unravel more insightful information like asset decay rates, asset criticality and methods to enhance the asset performance to utilise the assets up to their near-zero functionalities.

AI-powered Asset Performance Models
Water mainlines in footpaths and nature strips, major roadways, sealed roads, arterial roads, and freeways are all distinctive to one another. This is why their performances are invariant when compared to each other. Tigernix Water Asset Solution allows you a city-wide vision of the convoluted Water Main Systems via simulated interfaces (2D or 3D models) or via GIS (Geographic Information System) layers. The technological tools and modules of this smart solution employ advanced analytical protocols powered by predictive technology to test asset managers for the actual performance levels that match the desired standards during dynamic asset events.

  • Asset Management Algorithms
  • Automated KPI Updates
  • Collaborative Access for permitted parties
  • Optimal Asset Utilisation Mapping Tools
  • Scalable Visualised Asset Performance Dashboards

Trust the Performance of Asset Diagnostic and Maintenance Service Teams
Tigernix Water Asset Solution also enables end-users to check for asset service team availability at a given time frame. It will help the service team to schedule asset diagnostic services and water main maintenance programs based on a criticality basis. This solution can predict the availability and time taken by the service team to travel to the place whether the pipelines need professional asset maintenance service. It will also allow the asset managers to view the system downtime duration so that they can control the vales and pressure pumps to ensure that the continuity of the water services is not perturbed by the maintenance procedures.

  • AI-powered Asset Service Schedulers
  • Maintenance Alert Systems
  • Real-time Maintenance Profile Management
  • Updated Service Delivery Models
3. Asset Risk Detection And Avoiding

Asset Reliability Metrics
The Asset Reliability Metrics of the Tigernix Water Asset Solution is empowered by the simulation technology to allow asset managers to manipulate AI-powered ML models to detect the asset reliability levels by using asset criticality models and asset degradation curves. These technological tools allow asset managers to learn the rate of degradation of all assets in the Water Mian System based on their actual and desired conditions. Based on these models, the user will gain scientifically-based asset failure patterns, which will help them understand the level of reliability that they can place on the assets.

  • Asset Criticality Matrices
  • Asset Degradation Tools
  • Asset Failure Mapping Tools
  • Detect KPIs to understand Asset reliability better
  • Scalable and Intuitive Asset Reliability Matrices
  • Scalable Asset Current Vs Desired Condition Profiles

Failure Prediction Models
Tigernix Water Asset Solution has the propensity to capitalise asset data to evade asset failures to ensure that the Water Main System won’t face long-term impactful risks and failures with elongated system downtimes. It captures condition-based asset data in real-time and manipulates it along with historical asset information to predict asset failures that are highly likely to happen in the next 10 years.

  • Asset Failure Prediction Models
  • Detect Asset Outliers in real-time
  • Battle-Tested failure mapping tools
  • Comprehensive Asset Risk Control Schemas
  • Asset reliability Profile Managers

Summary

The Water Utility Industry harnesses numerous assets, and the Water Main Systems of Water Infrastructure Systems are more asset-dependent than most of its other phases. This is why asset custodians and asset maintenance crews of the Water Main Systems rely on Tigernix to capitalise their assets using this cutting-edge technology solution. Tigernix Water Asset Solution allows asset managers and other key stakeholders of the Water Main System to:

  • Be fully geared to face predicted asset failures and risks with the required talent and materials
  • Ensure that level of water service is at its best form at all times
  • Expand MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of maintenance teams
  • Reduce the number of asset failures and mitigate risks smartly
  • Save asset-oriented time, money and effort astoundingly
  • View Actual Conditions of Water Main assets and more.

Tigernix has propelled in allowing the client city council a plethora of advantages and efficiencies as mentioned above and helped them overcome all the main limitations they faced when housing a retro-fitting asset management system. Tigernix is therefore recognised as the best Software Solution Enabler in Australia for optimising the decision-making efforts of asset managers of asset-heavy industrial domains via a success-guaranteed solution like Tigernix Water Asset Solution. Our client was very happy with the digital transformation enabled by our solutions in managing their colossal Water Main Systems, and when they were asked how they feel after utilising this outstanding Tigernix Asset Solution, they replied “..we are definitely moving in the right direction!”. Connect with Tigernix to learn more about our success stories where we made asset-dependent industrial players have stressless and luxurious advantages in tackling critical assets every day! Get in touch with us on +(61) 7 3012 6312 or mail us at [email protected] for more information.

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