Costain, the infrastructure solutions company, in partnership with WSP, has been granted funding by Northumbrian Water to develop a new AI-powered platform designed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of data, thereby reducing delivery times for the company’s capital projects during asset management period 8 (AMP8).
The funding will enable Costain and WSP to develop a proof-of-concept for WISDOM – Wastewater Insights for Standardisation, Delivery, Operation and Maintenance – a platform that uses generative AI technology to capture, standardise and analyse large volumes of data from a variety of sources, providing a comprehensive intelligent database of operational assets.
With AMP8 investment programmes likely to see a doubling of investment from the previous cycle, and a corresponding increase in asset interventions, capital delivery and operational teams need to manage and evaluate larger, more complex sets of data for compliance purposes.
The WISDOM AI platform would seek to optimise, combine and process huge datasets, providing richer insight into operational performance for capital delivery teams working on AMP8 projects. The expectation is that 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 £10mn for Northumbrian Water over the course of the AMP8 lifecycle.
The idea was developed during Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival, where Costain and WSP were challenged with the task of revolutionising the designing and building of wastewater assets during the AMP8 investment cycle. Costain and WSP will deliver strategic infrastructure upgrades for the water company’s AMP8 investment programme.
Gavin Stonard, Framework Director at Costain, said: “Capital delivery programmes in AMP8 – which will see a doubling of investment on wastewater assets compared with AMP7 – will require enormous volumes of data to be gathered and analysed for design, operational and compliance purposes. This will be a considerable challenge and will not be accomplished using existing techniques.”