Tarnowskie Gòry, Veolia

Leaks found

water saved annually

water network covered

The challenge

Veolia Poland is a leading provider of infrastructure services in Poland including managing the water and wastewater networks in the southern Polish city of Tarnowskie Góry.

With average national water loss rates across Poland at around 15%, Veolia was looking to test advanced ways of detecting leaks as a means of better managing natural resources and protecting the environment.

Its innovation team wanted to assess the suitability of our artificial intelligence FIDO AI as a means to detect leaks by size and validate on 100km of predominantly steel water mains network in Tarnowskie Gòry, and to validate the success of the resulting repair work.

The solution

Working with Veolia operations experts, FIDO Tech’s technical team identified five DMAs (district metered areas).

These sections of the Tarnowksie Gòry Veolia network had historic water loss issues and were made up of ageing, mostly metallic pipelines.

We then deployed the FIDO sensors as part of a program using our Network Monitor and Leak Locate solutions in tandem.

Network Monitor is an network monitoring system comprising FIDO multi-use sensors with dial home IoT Relay devices and cloud-based artificial intelligence.

Using network GIS data, Network Locate identifies optimal deployment locations for sensors to minimise data blind spots. Then, AI analysis of the sensor data generates a heat map of leaks for investigation, ranked by size.

Leak Locate is as infield product for leak investigations. It uses the same type of sensor devices as correlators and ground microphones to pinpoint locate leaks. Following repair, FIDO AI confirms the work has been successful.

The results

FIDO sensors were deployed on a lift-and-shift basis across the Tarnowskie Gòry network over a period of four weeks.

AI analysis of data from 426 sensor sessions generated waypoints for in-field investigation by our trained experts who marked-up seven leaks and passed the details to Veolia for repair.

Up to the date of publication, seven repairs have been completed and validated. The annual water saved from these seven leaks alone totals over 62,000 m³.

The FIDO project helped Tarnowskie Gòry save a significant amount of water by leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence. It demonstrated the value of FIDO technology as an easy-to-adopt cost-effective means for Polish leak teams to reduce non-revenue water without the requirement for additional equipment.