720503Sewerage Networks Active System Monitoring for Reduced Property FloodingClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UK‘Sewerage network failure’ caused by blockages is known as a Flooding Other Causes (FOC) as it is triggered by something other than hydraulic overload of the sewerage system in the normal state. Property damage and clean-up can be £10k per property; in 2012 a Water Sewerage Company (WSC) which cannot be disclosed due to current negotiations with OFWAT had 17,000 escapes at a cost of £17M. OFWAT have introduced the Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM) which through key indictors encourages WSCs to improve their asset and customer performance. SIM affects the prices WSCs are allowed to charge customers (their price limit); poor performers are penalised £10s millions and the best rewarded with higher price limits. No current viable system exists to alarm when an FOC event occurs, except from the customer. This is partly because of the geographical scale of the problem and the also the cost to own/operate legacy monitoring systems (£3k procure, £500/year operate). With an aging sewerage infrastructure the direction of travel for WSCs is innovation with many identifying sewer monitoring as a key way forward. Environmental Monitoring Solutions (EMS) wishes to conduct a ‘Development of Prototype’ project to engineer a remote sensor system capable of operating in a passive mode with little maintenance and no cleaning. The proposed system will encompass GPRS communications techniques to transfer alarms to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based central processing modules and FOC incidence database. This system will allow simple threshold data to visibly show representation of the network state, prompting proactive management by the operator and reacting to potential and developing blockages before they impact on their customers. These meters do not exist, need to be low cost; they cannot be anything other than simple. The business proposition to develop and supply the proposed technology has been validated through discussion with five WSCs.