Anglian Water - Blockage/Criticality • Optimatics

Customer Reference

Annesley Crisp
Project and Engagement Manager Anglian Water

Key Points

Identify critical pipelines and assess the impact of population growth
Determine necessary interventions for both current and future scenarios
Enhance solutions to provide better outcomes for customers and the community
Ensure GWW meets its compliance responsibilities to ultimately build network resilience

Background

Anglian Water supplies water and water recycling services to almost seven million people in the East of England and Hartlepool. This project focused on the Cambridge area, which is 5,830 ha in total area, 165,000 in population, and 670 km in length of collection network.

Purpose

This project was a pilot project to apply and present the capabilities of the AssetAdvanced™ Criticality Module, in which Anglian Water was looking to identify the sensitivity of their network to failures and identify critical areas in the system. They sought to gain insight regarding how sensitive their network was to blockages, where the most hydraulically vulnerable areas were, what the impacts of blocked pipes were throughout the network, what blockage impacts were experienced at each point in the network, how long operators had to respond to blockages, and where sensors could be placed for the best coverage of critical locations.

The combined sewer network has a total length of around 670km. For the blockage analysis, the storm water network was not considered. The AssetAdvanced™ Criticality Module (ICM integration) software was used for the analysis. The goal of the project was to work together wit the Anglian Water team to apply the Criticality Module to gain valuable insights into the Cambridge network and inform improved operations and planning efforts going forward.

Project Scope

Optimatics conducted a formulation workshop with members of the Anglian Water team to establish dry weather flow and rainfall scenarios, blockage levels and design criteria (flooding, CSOs, etc.) to use in the analysis. A formulation was prepared and used to run a series of blockage analyses. Results were processed, and a summary report and protocol for application to other sewersheds was produced.

Outcomes

Five scenarios were used for this project: 100% blockage for Dry Weather Flow; and 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% blockage for Wet Weather Flow (5-year return, 120mn storm). Approximately 8,000 blockage simulations were run for each scenario. A data table was generated to assess the blockage consequences across the entire network for all simulations run. An ArcGIS Online dashboard was generated to visualize and interact with the results of the analysis. A pipe criticality model based on the results of the blockage analysis was also generated. Results can be combined with external datasets and processes to add more value. Outputs included top 500 critical pipes and custom risk weighting for each pipe.