Smarter than your average water infrastructure

Water pipes are an essential component of any city’s infrastructure and need careful maintenance. Burst water pipes are an expensive bane for water utilities but it is both expensive and disruptive to assess the condition of water pipes, and as a result only 1% of the network is inspected a year.

CSIRO Data61’s Smart Infrastructure Team is working to address this problem, with the development of an analytical tool that can make intelligent predications about water pipe failures so maintenance can be scheduled before they burst.

This gives the ability to better prioritise pipes for maintenance and in turn reduce costs and minimise disruption to water supplies. It has been validated worldwide through datasets coming from more than 27 utilities.

This project by scientists from CSIRO’s Data61 group won the Excellence in Data Science category at this year’s Eureka Prizes award, which was announced in August.

“Data is very powerful, and data science is building a smart brain for our society, for a better future,” said Fang Chen, Research Group Leader, as she accepted the award.

The Smart Infrastructure team (known then as Enterprise Analytics) were part of the ON program, and graduated through Accelerate 2.

University of Technology Sydney Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science: Bin Liang, Dr Jianjia Zhang, Dr Fang Chen, Zhidong Li, Dr Yang Wang, Smart Infrastructure Team, CSIRO’s Data61. Australian Museum Eureka Prizes © Photo by Salty Dingo 2018.