Maurizia Brunetti from HERA and Camilla Braithwaite from Rezatec joined Mark Kaney from Black & Veatch to discuss their path from pilot study to full deployment using Geospatial AI to prioritise their network, improve leakage detection and maintenance.
Using Rezatec’s Pipeline Risk product, HERA’s engineering team are identifying up to twice as many leaks compared to previous methods.
“Rezatec’s solution was able to provide us with the appropriate accuracy to identify leaks and will help inform our pipeline replacement program going forward.” Maurizia Brunetti, Water Supply Technical Coordination Manager Hera Group.
Not only can HERA’s engineering team use the product to find the pipe sections that are most likely to have a leak to prioritise maintenance, repairs or use of sensors, but HERA can take a more proactive, strategic approach to asset replacement programs in the long term.
Rezatec’s product, Pipeline Risk, helps Hera prioritise pipeline replacement by assessing the likelihood of failure in each section of pipe using historic pipe failure data to build a model which analyses data about the material, diameter and age of the asset, as well as the soil and terrain that surrounds it. The other metric that is required is the consequence or impact if that failure were to occur. Rezatec’s solution can express the consequence of failure as a cost to the utility that takes into account the number and type of customers affected, third party liability, transport interruptions and the direct cost of digging up and replacing the pipe itself.
Retrospective analysis of data from 2016-2018, for a 490km section of HERA’s water network gave them the confidence in the Rezatec solution. HERA is now engaged in a roll out of the product across another 2,800 km of its network in 2020, to inform the wider infrastructure replacement and maintenance programs for each year.
