Objectives of the service
The UK water industry is heavily regulated by Ofwat, with significant fines (or rewards) being issued for under (or over) performance as part of the sector’s Outcome Delivery Incentive. During 2023-24, the sector incurred £157.6 million of underperformance payments. Ofwat’s performance review specifically identified asset health and leakage reduction as two of the key areas requiring improvement.
Inspection and monitoring of buried pipe networks is challenging and costly, and maintenance budgets are stretched. Pipe failure risk modelling is used to prioritise maintenance efforts, based on a multitude of data including pipe parameters and third-party data.
Ground movement measurements are currently not included in water utility risk modelling. SatSense has a country-wide ground movement product able to measure movement rates down to 1 mm/year with high resolution. SatSense have created metrics which highlight areas most pertinent to pipe failure risk due to ground movement. This project has seen three water utilities, Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent Water and Northumbrian Water, ingest ground movement data into their models for the first time using different methods for the different use cases, including Arcadis’ industry leading Enterprise Decision Analytics (EDA) asset investment planning models.
Users and their needs
There are around 20 water and sewerage companies in the UK who are regulated by OFWAT. Each of these companies has ambitious performance commitments for leakage, supply interruptions, and mains repairs, amongst others.
By integrating ground movement information into pipe renewal modelling, strategic teams are able to make better decisions about which pipes should be replaced or repaired, reducing the frequency of bursts and leaks over the network.
With this additional information, water utilities are able to:
- Make better long-term strategic maintenance decisions,
- Apply a more targeted approach to pipe maintenance and failure repair, preventing failure events, which in turn improves safety, reduces damage and reduces costs.
Service/ system concept
SatSense processes ESA Sentinel-1 data over the UK and other countries, and converts this into ground movement products. There are over 700 million measurement points over the UK, all kept up to date with newly acquired data. Each measurement point has long-term movement rates accurate up to 1 mm/year, and a full-time history of movement measurements with a measurement frequency of 6-12 days.
This ground movement data contains valuable information for water utilities, which SatSense extract by further post-processing. The resultant data highlights pipes which have experienced recent high-risk ground movement. This is fed into investment planning models, improving the prioritisation of pipe maintenance and reducing failure rates.
Space Added Value
SatSense uses radar data from the Sentinel-1 satellite constellation to measure ground movements and create ground movement products.
Current Status
Thanks to the improvements seen in water utility asset management models, the partners are actively exploring commercial partnerships.
Prime Contractor(s)
Subcontractor(s)
