Leveraging data to improve water network operations

Diana Galindo (Mott MacDonald) and Heather Kikkert (Hamilton City Council)

Population growth and climate change have significantly increased the pressure on water bodies, and water management needs to become more efficient to meet these challenges. Water network managers must work to create a water supply system that is highly resilient, efficient, and sustainable to protect water sources and their intrinsic values as well as respond to increased customer expectations. Through optimising the water network, significant amounts of energy, treatment and pumping costs, and treatment resources can be saved.

Hamilton City Council has a strategy to create water supply zones to better manage its water network and control water losses. The Council is working to hydraulically separate the entire city network into water supply zones with district metered areas (DMAs). Strategic flow metering will enable understanding of water consumption and water losses without residential metering.

A mass balance approach is used to understand water consumption, plus the location and volume of water losses. The flow composition looks at getting an estimation of the net water consumption and how much is lost through the distribution. The effectiveness of this system depends highly on the densification, accuracy, and continuity of the metering system. Flow records are captured every five minutes, seven days a week, in more than seventy locations within the network.

To transform this large volume of flow data into insightful outputs has required the joint effort of multiple disciplines. Leveraging Hamilton City Council’s knowledge of the network, plus the data management experience that Mott MacDonald offers has allowed the development of custom tools to enable data-based decision making. Graphic representations of the water network, DMAs, meter locations, plus charts of water consumption and pressure have provided a clear picture of the current state of the network and tools to support further optimisation.

This paper will provide examples of data visualisation and how this has been used to improve day to day operations of the water network in Hamilton City. Some lessons learnt along the way will be shared so that others may learn from Hamilton’s experiences.

Hamilton City Council’s experience has shown that efficient data management is essential to understand, control, and optimise its water network. Being able to visualise the data has helped to understand the status of the network and the challenges for each DMA. Sharing experiences and working collaboratively across councils and consultants will enable the New Zealand water industry to respond and facilitate the changes driven by population growth and climate change.