Once considered a threat to people’s jobs, automation is enabling many in the water sector to leave mundane behind and focus on high value work, helping councils to build smarter, safer, faster and more reliable processes and services to communities.
Engineering graduates, and other specialists, are often employed to sit in front of video screens for weeks on end to watch footage from drone mounted cameras being driven through pipes.
These roles exist so councils and utilities can assess where pipe maintenance needs to be carried out and ensure issues are caught easily and before they escalate.
So to save the time of engineers, and hours of tedious work, smart technology is being deployed to create automated solutions using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
What a difference data makes
Technology fuelled by AI is driving change in the water sector – helping workers do more of what they want to do, while meeting increasingly high expectations.
For example, councils and water authorities have extensive kilometres of underground pipelines for wastewater, stormwater and water.
John Phillips, Business Development Manager at Interflow, a leader in pipeline infrastructure, said, “Many of these pipes are approaching the end of their life and they need to be renewed. Digging them up to replace them all would be extremely expensive and would disrupt communities.”
How do water managers assess where work is needed?
Previously it has been undertaken by sending a camera through the pipes and relying on an operator to conduct an accurate analysis.
“By the time they engage a contractor to do the upgrade work, often the footage is very old,” Mr Phillips said.
“Things could be completely different by the time we go to do the job.”
That’s where a neat, AI-based solution comes to the fore.
The future of water management
A faster and smarter solution is now being utilised by leading councils and authorities to aid in their water asset management.
A solution that removes repetitive and low-value work and liberates engineers and others to do the higher-value tasks that keep communities’ infrastructure running smoothly.
“The analysis of the condition of the pipes can all be done by machine,” John Weaver, Contracts Manager at Interflow, said.
Instead of camera footage being analysed by humans, it is analysed by an AI engine that has been trained on tens of thousands of hours of similar footage.
“It categorises every individual issue found and provides an immediate, real-time report of the entire pipe network,” Mr Weaver said.
“A recommended capital works program, complete with anticipated costs, comes with the analysis. This means the council or water authority can work that program into their budget over the next four or five years.”
The transformative effect of AI is helping to make condition assessment reports and asset maps faster, more objective and more consistent.
This technology removes the often mundane and repetitive work, which in the current environment where the war for talent has become very real, is welcome.
This is a sponsored editorial brought to you by Interflow, for more information go to www.interflow.com.au
