Data Evangelist
A real challenge: Water Losses
Managing a leaky water distribution network is a real challenge. Water losses mean not only an increase in the cost of doing business but also a loss of such a critical resource as water.
The passage of time leads to the appearance of new leaks and, with it, an increase in costs, which further reduces profits and, with it, the budgets for maintenance and repair of the network increase. These budgets are even more difficult to estimate if we perform reactive maintenance (replacing a pipe when a leak occurs rather than replacing it before it breaks). Only underestimating these costs can severely affect the business and our planet.
Predictive maintenance can improve the estimation. For this purpose, those assets with a higher probability of leakage are prioritized. This process requires additional work in making this estimate, which can also lead to higher costs if we do not select properly. This prediction can be highly complicated to perform in practice as it is conditioned by many factors that affect the probability of leakage.
The data era
The old manual management of assets, with few digital records and staff turnover, means that a great deal of knowledge about the network is currently lost in the memory of former employees as it is not recorded. We must add the frequent human errors in the manual recording assets.
This data that was not previously exploited can now be transformed into useful information. We are in the data era; any activity we carry out generates information that can significantly benefit the business. Many will wonder how useful it is to have my network of assets in a digitized format.
Having my assets network in a digital format optimizes this prioritization using various techniques and algorithms. Through this estimation, we can anticipate breaks and leaks in our network, enabling us to plan maintenance activities, thus reducing our costs. We can increasingly improve the results through artificial intelligence (AI) that learns the peculiarities of our network and those characteristics that generate a higher probability of leakage.
Although there are multiple solutions and sensors to help detect leaks in our network, we must distinguish that, although they are beneficial, they correspond to corrective maintenance. The consequent cost increase does not allow us to plan our maintenance activities.
How can Fracta help us save water and manage our water network more efficiently?
Fracta, on the other hand, offers a digital solution through AI that allows us to anticipate leaks and help us detect them without any additional equipment installation, performing data cleaning and correction. With Fracta, leakage predictions in our water distribution network are available in less than 45 days.
This technology predicts the probability of failure in different periods for each asset in our network using more than 150 factors with predictive power. This estimate facilitates the prioritization of maintenance tasks and the detection of existing leaks.
Cost scenarios are also generated for each pipe, considering its characteristics and the critical facilities it serves, generating a failure cost estimate. This probability of breakage multiplied by the cost can be used as a metric to prioritize our businesses’ maintenance costs. Thus, water losses and maintenance costs are reduced by correctly prioritizing assets.
