Satellite data will detect changes in the built environment to help minimise ongoing disruptions to UK water supplies.
The two-year project – run in collaboration with Northumbrian Water – aims to ensure that construction work doesn’t result in utilities outages, which is particularly welcome given the anticipated easing of UK planning laws.
The project, overseen by geospatial tech experts MGISS, is part-funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). Its Interruption Prevention Alert Service (IPAS) technology will identify and locate development risks close to critical utility assets, which also include gas).
Outages caused by building works are a growing problem, and the challenges faced by utilities are likely to intensify with the government’s anticipated easing of UK planning laws as part of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.
IPAS’s preventative solution is also expected to deliver added value through cost savings and a cut in carbon emissions, in support of a sustainable utility network.
The €1m project is supported by €500,000 in match funding from ESA and will run initially for two years to test its technical and commercial viability, and develop a go-to-market plan.
MGISS is heading up the project with data partner Geospatial Insight, client partners Northumbrian Water Group and Northern Gas Networks, and funding partners ESA and the UK Space Agency.
The pilot project follows a joint workshop with ESA at Northumbrian Water’s 2020 Innovation Workshop, and two years of collaboration with the two utilities.
Clive Surman-Wells, Innovation Partnerships Manager at Northumbrian Water Group, added: “Building works on or near our strategic mains pose a very real threat to the resilience of water supply to our customers.
“It’s very challenging to detect and intervene early because our network covers such a huge geographical area. The IPAS project offers an ‘eye-in-the-sky’ solution, leveraging satellite data and combining it with our own asset data records to proactively identify risks sooner.
“Our operations team at Essex and Suffolk Water will be working with MGISS and Geospatial Insight on the initial test area, and we are planning to expand the trial across all of our regions by 2024.”
Michael Darracott, managing director at MGISS, said: “I’m looking forward to working with our partners to promote the value of capturing, using, maintaining, and leveraging accurate and reliable geospatial data.
“We already have a significant amount of interest from operators within the water and gas sectors, and we envisage wider potential in other sectors of the UK and global economies.”
Mike Cooper, Innovation and Strategy Manager at MGISS, added: “We’ve been successfully supporting our utility partners for several years, helping them to build richly attributed and accurate asset records.
“This solution will enable utilities providers to leverage investment in those data records, combining them with change-detection data from satellite services to enable them to avoid supply disruption via a preventative insight service.”
The IPAS project is part of a growth strategy for MGISS, enabling the creation of high-quality jobs in the North West region. The project has also allowed MGISS to sponsor a PhD student at the University of Liverpool’s Data Science department for four years.
