The Challenge
A core component of water management is the treatment of wastewater and its by-products, colloquially known as sludge. To do this effectively, the Yorkshire Water wastewater team required a solution that could distil a complex network of sites and production data into a minimum cost treatment schedule, allowing them to plan the sludge management process more efficiently.
Alongside this, the end-users wanted a solution that they could ‘tweak’ and re-run, either to incorporate recent site changes/impacts or plan for potential operational scenarios. And at the same time, Yorkshire Water wanted to achieve an outcome with minimal OPEX expenditure.
How We Did It
Following an initial MVP to prove our solution’s technical capability, we collaborated with Italik, the end-users, and data science and IT teams to expand this into a production-level solution. This ensured we could bring together open source technologies, an Azure-based architecture, and graph-based modelling techniques to create a deployed solution in around four months.
The project also coincided with the start of the first National lock-down, so we were unable to meet the client team or business sponsor face-to-face or visit the site. Despite operating remotely in this far from ideal scenario, we worked effectively with the Yorkshire Water teams to deliver the project to schedule.
The Outcome
- A performant solution is utilised multiple times per week, allowing Yorkshire Water to develop business critical, user-specified production plans and associated costs.
- The operational team’s ability to adapt and refine the model to test various scenarios was a previously unachievable process.
- A significant reduction in Yorkshire Water’s OPEX costs, which is a huge factor in the utility market.