Operation Dashboard

What if we knew, in real time, where flood related incidents were occurring, what was causing them, who was attending to them and what rainfall was approaching. Putting the customer at the heart of what Healthy Waters does identified a need to integrate several high value data streams into a single operational dashboard to support on call operational team(s) with actionable insights of real-time events.

Leveraging the existing Storm-I platform a real-time business intelligence dashboard was developed which integrated request for service (RFS) data direct from the call centre, real time rain and flow monitoring data, contractor (or first response) assignments, RFS status and future rainfall forecasts.

Assimilating RFS location and issue types with actual rainfall totals across the region allows operational teams to quickly understand the current scale and scope of flooding related issues during an event. In addition, access to short term rainfall forecasts, computed from advanced rainfall radar nowcasting analytics, allows event management teams the ability to see the unseen and better focus resources to where they might be needed next. This additional insight helps event managers facilitate response activities to ensure customers safety and wellbeing is prioritised and storm water services are delivered to the highest level.

The dashboard is geospatial first, providing a heat map style visualisation on a regional basis but the dashboard also includes custom analytics and summary statistics for the region and surfaces key performance indicators of the first response teams to the on call operational coordinator during the event. Hosted in Storm-I, a fully web-based application, allows the information to easily be disseminated to all stakeholders during the event. Healthy Waters is also looking to connect the dashboard with other emergency response organisations such as the fire department and civil defence to enable a richer view as the event unfolds.

In addition to real time data visualisation, event management statistics and future rainfall predictions the dashboard allows authenticated users full access to historic data so detailed retrospective event analysis and reporting can be undertaken. The dashboard has driven the time commitment, and subsequent cost, of post event reporting down from 1 day to 10 min and includes a richer set of insights for all stakeholders to communicate the story to customers and their representatives.

Understanding historic incidents also provides insight into the future. Having a single consolidated data environment with all relevant data allows Healthy Waters to start exploring statistics and correlation in the data using modern machine learning techniques to help identify hot spots and prioritise maintenance work with the aim of transitioning from reactive response towards flood prevention.