Northumbrian Water, UK

network areas surveyed

improvement in POI conversion rate

leakage reduction per hour

The challenge

Northumbrian Water (NWL) is a UK utility which manages manages 17,500 km of distribution pipelines serving around 2.7 million people in the North East of England. Its networks cover densely populated urban centres as well as rural and remote communities.

The company was already familiar with FIDO, having successfully used its AI fixed monitoring solution, Network Monitor, to supply points of investigation (POIs) in selected high-risk areas during the winter breakout season. Managers wanted to further trial FIDO’s lift-and-shift (mobile) solution, Leak Locate, for its own in-house leak teams.

The solution

FIDO’s Leak Locate mobile solution was used sideby- side with NWL’s incumbent technology over a period of three months, to enable a direct comparison.

We trained each participating NWL leak technician with the FIDOSmart app and equipped them with Sweep kits containing 75 acoustic AI sensors. NWL‘s office-based team was also given direct access to FIDO’s integrated analytics platform, the FIDO Hub.

At the start of each sweep, FIDO AI used NWL’s GIS data to generate optimal deployment locations (ODLs) for each technician’s available sensor fleet, accounting for pipe material and asset availability. Technicians then deployed the sensors to their assigned ODLs for overnight data capture. Once uploaded to FIDO AI, this data was analyzed instantly, allowing each sensor to be redeployed to a new area for further sweeps.

FIDO AI automatically clustered results into points of investigation (POIs) on the GIS and ranked them by estimated leak size. Using the Hub, senior technicians reviewed, prioritized and assigned POIs to field teams, who received job details via their FIDO app and updated the app as their investigations progressed. This gave managers to ability to view end-to-end progress and collaborate with field teams in real time if needed.

The results

FIDO sensors were deployed almost 4,000 times across 86 DMAs and helped reduce leakage in 47 of them. With a number of repairs still outstanding at time of publication, the water saving attributed to FIDO during the trial so far is 36.4 liters per second.

NWL reported that FIDO’s overall POI conversion rate was 34% higher than that achieved with the incumbent solution.

Managers rated the additional visibility and efficiency provided by the FIDO system, in particular the ease with which FIDO AI adapted sensor deployment density to the network material type, the reduced workload for data analysts thanks to FIDO’s automatic signal analysis, and the simplified workflow management offered by the Hub’s live, easy-to-use, centralized dashboard.