UrbanWater

An affordable O&M platform for municipalities to increase the accessibility and sustainability of clean water by transitioning the utility from an offline, reactive and ad-hoc O&M model to an online, predictive, and demand-driven O&M model.

UrbanWater increases accountability for service delivery by making water visible.

India's urban water and sewage infrastructure is severely underdeveloped resulting in a water supply of only a few hours every day, an average 50% of supplied water being non-revenue and in nearly 80% of urban sewage remaining untreated. 

In most cities/towns in India, there is some water and drainage infrastructure present. There is also an effort to build out infrastructure to meet some fraction of the unmet demand. However, the infrastructure is badly planned, under-designed and badly managed resulting in a far lower level of service. The asset management is mostly on paper registers, resources are not metered/monitored, operations across vast networks are rarely tracked and maintenance is purely reactive. Expertise is available only in employee memories but is rarely institutionalized. Such cities need to transition from an offline, reactive and ad-hoc O&M model to an online, predictive, and demand-driven O&M model.

Current smart water or intelligent water platforms expect data rich environments with sensors/devices or meters and have been built mostly for the developed world. Such platforms can be unaffordable and unsuitable to most cities and towns in India.

SmartTerra's O&M platform, UrbanWater, is cloud-hosted, affordable and packages advanced geo-spatial analytics and machine learning underneath a simple and intuitive mobile-first interface. 

India is not alone in the developing world in trying to find smart yet low-cost solutions to manage scarce urban resources for an increasing population. UrbanWater can be applicable to many countries in Asia, Africa and South America. UrbanWater can be quickly put to use because of its cloud-hosted and mobile-first approach.

- Typical town with 50-100KM of pipeline and 50-100KM of drains

- Aging networks and the cumulative maintenance not tracked

- No visibility into the condition of the infrastructure 

- Reactive handling of Pipe-bursts, contamination complaints and drain blockages (@ 1 per day per 10,000 people)

- Water supply for an hour per day. 50% is wasted as Non-Revenue-Water (leakages, illegal connections and non-metering)

- 30% of the municipal budget for water expenses (electricity, chlorine, etc) but little metering.

There is no management without monitoring and measuring. Processes are commonly monitored in industries and companies to reduce in-efficiencies. Municipal services started improving once service levels were measured.

Data analytics for utilities is common in the West and the benefits are well understood. In India, IBM, TaKaDu, Veolia, etc target only large metros because the solutions are expensive and need capital intensive metering.

The eGovernment Solutions roll out in Andhra has shown that municipalities which do not have a technical/analytical expertise benefit hugely from cloud-hosted solutions.

- O&M expense reduction

- Citizens will see service transparency (Is the water being supplied to me dis-infected properly?)

- City leadership will see easier decision-making (Which areas were under-supplied last year?)

- Network engineers will have visibility into the network health (Do these low-pressure complaints by citizens imply a failing valve?)

- Field workers will have greater access to location-aware network information (In this street, where are the joints located?)

Track water/sewage budgets.

Track pumphouse electricity usage.

Track days for maintenance task open/pending. - - O&M expense reduction

UrbanWater binds together a city's water and sewage networks' GIS, asset and operational attributes with the city's demographics to form a foundation. This foundation is overlaid with real-time geo-tagged O&M data collected using simple mobile apps. In addition, geo-tagged customer complaints/requests data is collected.

UrbanWater utilizes geo-spatial analytics and machine learning to then make sense of the collected data on top of the network/asset foundation.

Standardized and open data models/APIs allow connecting to existing third-party devices and databases (if available).