Anglian Water commissions Black & Veatch to create one of the world’s first water utility digital twins

One of the world’s first water utility digital twins will be created for Anglian Water by Black & Veatch. The utility’s ‘future water company, today,’ initiative uses the Newmarket region of its operating area as a proving ground for innovations promising the greatest benefits. As part of this Black & Veatch is creating a digital representation of the region’s water treatment and distribution infrastructure and embedding Hybrid Adaptive Real-time Virtual Intelligence (HARVI), an artificial intelligence (AI) provided by its strategic partner EMAGIN, into the digital twin. This enables predictive capabilities and intuitive decision support and intervention.

“This is an exciting stage for us as this is our first co-developed solution with EMAGIN. The AI enabled digital twin will be an integrated digital representation of the Newmarket region’s physical assets which provides historical, current and predictive analysis in near real-time,” according to Mark Kaney, Director of Asset Management, Black & Veatch Europe. “What separates the digital twin from a conventional model is that the twin is in constant dialogue with its physical counterpart, enabling Anglian Water to simulate and scenario test options before actioning them in the real world.”

Anglian Water describes the Newmarket region as a ‘shop window’ for its cutting edge approach to delivering water services. The ‘future water company, today,’ initiative has set seven ambitious goals for Newmarket: zero leakage and bursts; 100 per cent customer satisfaction; water consumption of 80 litres per person per day; zero pollution and flooding; 100 per cent compliant and chemical-free drinking water; carbon neutrality; and building a circular economy that eliminates the concept of waste from the processes. The digital twin is a significant step towards meeting those goals.

A water utility digital twin offers the prospect of helping enhance customer experience, without increasing bills to fund improvements, by optimising performance of existing assets and increasing the efficiency with which they are operated and maintained. The twin supports this by facilitating systems thinking - combining multiple internal and external data sources across the asset base with predictive analytical techniques served through multiple functional views. This enables improved insights that support better decisions, leading to better outcomes in the physical world.

“As we start to see more digital twins manifest in industries like water and power, the next big milestone is about how we can make them more actionable. This is precisely where AI enablement brings the most value – it’s about leveraging data across multiple layers of infrastructure to make the best operational decisions at the right time” commented Thouheed Abdul Gaffoor, EMAGIN’s Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder.

The interface between Anglian Water’s asset monitoring and control networks, EMAGIN’s AI HARVI and Black & Veatch’s analytics and visualisation tools, will be managed using Black & Veatch’s ECO-X digital ecosystem environment. ECO-X facilitates the seamless interaction of common water industry tools, utilities’ enterprise IT systems and Black & Veatch’s own AI-enabled data gathering, analytics and management tools.

Click here to download an infographic explaining the digital twin.

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Editor’s Notes:

• Anglian Water serves 6 million customers. At 27,500 square kilometres the company has the largest geographical operating area of all English and Welsh water utilities.
• The utility operates and maintains 1,257 water and water recycling treatment works; and 112,833  kilometres of water and sewer pipes.
• ECO-X is Black & Veatch’s digital performance intelligence ecosystem. It facilitates integration of the company’s digital technology products and services – including those below – with clients’ enterprise IT systems and third-party digital tools:
  *HARVI, the artificial intelligence provided by Black & Veatch’s strategic partner EMAGIN, provides predictive asset performance and intelligent operational decision support.
  *HELIX is Black & Veatches digital twin platform which is able to generate across the asset base.
  *Serene is our unique digitally enabled water supply network health check, monitoring and optimisation tool.
  *Totex Efficiency Diagnostics (TED), supports effective application of a water company’s TOTEX solutions hierarchy.
  *TRAC provides single use or dynamic assessment of asset data sets with targeted improvement analysis.

About Black & Veatch

Black & Veatch is an employee-owned, global leader in building critical human infrastructure in Energy, Water, Telecommunications and Government Services. Since 1915, we have helped our clients improve the lives of people in over 100 countries through consulting, engineering, construction, operations and program management. Our revenues in 2018 were US$3.5 billion. Follow us on www.bv.com and in social media.