Intelligent network company i2O harnesses data to detect network faults

Case Study

i2O: An evolution from pressure management to intelligent network solutions.

i2O provides a suite of smart network solutions to help water utilities respond to the challenges created by an increasing and urbanising population, extreme weather and ageing infrastructure. Today it has more than 100 utilities in over 40 countries around the world that have installed its solutions. Headquartered in Southampton, UK i2O also has offices in Malaysia, and Colombia.

Intelligent networks make the most of existing infrastructure: reducing leakage and bursts, energy use and CO2 emissions, and operating costs whilst improving service to customers.

Challenge

i2O was a company with market-leading control and monitoring devices to help reduce water leakage.

But water companies needed to do much more to improve network performance, relying extensively on customer feedback to identify problems; on traditional time/risk-based approaches to asset maintenance; and on sporadic projects to improve network performance.

Serious water leaks can still be a huge problem, with a recent water leak in the Finsbury Park area of London affecting a 500 square meter space, damaging many properties, and leaving many residents without water for over 24 hours.

i2O recognised that it was collecting masses of data through its devices, that water companies were collecting other network-relevant data; but these weren’t being harnessed to detect network faults earlier, schedule maintenance on the basis of asset condition, or identify opportunities to optimise network performance.

Solution

Rather than building its own data analytics team, i2O came to Mango Solutions for their extensive experience and skills.

The initial scope of work was to implement a tool to infer the condition of a critical network asset – the PRV (pressure reducing valve). This has enabled water companies to shift to condition based maintenance.  This can significantly reduce the cost of scheduled maintenance as most of this is unnecessary and incurs risk when technicians carry out the maintenance on the network.

This tool has subsequently been included as a feature in i2O’s iNet software tool, a hardware agnostic solution offered in addition to i2O’s logging and advanced pressure management solutions.  It has leapfrogged i2O into the big data AI world of high value analytics.

With just 1,500 devices monitoring the network, iNet does the work of 100 analysts, reviewing data at whatever time of day it arrives.  It brings together network-relevant data and delivers insight from it.  It provides dashboard, table, map, graph and alarm features to make the insight actionable.

Results

i2O’s work with Mango Solutions represents the perfect blend of existing standout technology joining forces with an exemplary data-led strategy.  More than a dozen i2O clients are already using iNet within a year of its launch.  One had reduced leakage by 15% in the north of their city, population 1.2m, within 2 weeks of using the solution based on the insight it provided.

Joel Hagan, i2O’s CEO, commented: “Many companies find it difficult to build and maintain their own dedicated analytics team and even if they do they lack the breadth and depth of experience that a specialist can provide.  Mango Solutions has enabled i2O to accelerate its progress towards its goal of providing the market-leading network monitoring software solution to complement our other market-leading intelligent network solutions for the water industry.”

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