Data crunching project could slice £10m from Northumbrian capital bill

Northumbrian Water has funded a partnership between Costain and WSP to develop an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to speed up the water company’s delivery of capital projects under AMP8 and reduce its costs by £10m.

The partnership said the funding will enable it to develop a proof-of-concept for a system that will “improve the efficiency and accuracy of data.” Framework director at Costain, Gavin Stonard, warned that the demands in data gathering and analysis for AMP8 “will not be accomplished using existing techniques”. 

The platform – Wastewater Insights for Standardisation, Delivery, Operation and Maintenance (Wisdom), according to the partnership, uses generative AI technology to “capture, standardise and analyse large volumes of data from a variety of sources.”

It went on: “The expectation is the platform will reduce the need for wastewater works managers to repeatedly provide and analyse operational data for delivery teams, thereby reducing time spent on data entry which can be up to 45% of their working week. This will in turn improve overall delivery times and potentially save more than £10m for Northumbrian Water over the course of the AMP8 lifecycle.”

The idea emerged from Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival last summer. Head of engineering, Northumbrian Water, Richard Seales, said the Wisdom project “was one of the standout ideas from our Innovation Festival and we’re excited to see how its application could solve a big challenge facing the whole of the water sector.”