Anglian Water commissions Black & Veatch Creates First Water Utility Digital Twins
It is one of the world’s first water utility digital twins that will be created for Anglian Water by Black & Veatch. The utility’s future water company initiative currently uses the Newmarket region of its operating area as a providing ground for innovations promising the greatest benefits. As part of the Back & Veatch it 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.”
It is a cutting-edge approach to deliver water services. The “future water company, today”, initiative has set seven ambitious goals to Newmarket: zero leakage and bursts; 100 percent customer satisfaction; water consumption of 80 liters per person per day; zero pollution and flooding; 100 percent 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.
This concept will offer the prospect of helping customer experience, without increasing bills to fund improvement. Optimizing performance of existing assets and increasing efficiency with they are operated and maintained.
“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 visualization 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.