Innovate UK Data-driven Precision Surface Water Management for Urban Environments

Increasing levels of urbanization and climate change dictate that managing surface water in cities is an area of major concern. At present the maintainers of the surface water drainage infrastructure have a limited understanding of the way in which this network operates and how it should best be maintained to protect citizens from the risks of flooding and environmental damage through pollution. Existing systems, pioneered by members of this consortium, have recently enabled new forms of intelligent maintenance regimes but their effectiveness is severely constrained by the limited data available. In this project we will create a system that delivers a step-change in the quality and quantity of data available from our urban water infrastructure and enables a transformation in our understanding of the network and how best it can be maintained. If successful we will deliver a world-class urban surface water management system that can be used to increase the effectiveness of city maintenance practices, support new data-driven applications and reduce overall costs in a time of increasing urbanization.

The project has the potential to transform the way we manage highways surface water in urban environments. The system will be comprised of a new low-cost sensor network for urban gullies, new data sets that enhance our understanding of the role of gullies in managing urban pollution and new data models and decision support systems that enable effective action to be taken by city authorities. Gullies are an important component of urban infrastructure and members of the consortium have shown that targeted gully cleaning can be used in order to reduce the number of cleaning cycles (delivering cost savings), while minimizing the risk of surface water flooding (environmental and economic benefits) and to help control toxin levels (ensuring compliance with EU and UK legislation and avoiding financial penalties). However, existing approaches are either manual and suffer from high costs and inaccuracies associated with manual inspections or rely on prototype sensors that are expensive to maintain, have exhibited reliability issues and are only able to supply low-fidelity data. The opportunity lies in addressing these obstacles to enable the widespread adoption of a sensor driven system for fine-grained surface water management that enables urban authorities to reduce the cost of associated maintenance while delivering improved resilience in terms of surface water flooding and enhanced environmental protection through better management of roadside toxins.

Our dissemination route to potential near-term users will be through our working relationships with InTouch and a wide range of councils & operators formed as part of the EPSRC/TSB funded FAITH trusted-services project, the Smart Streets IoT Demonstrator Project and the Smart Clean feasibility study. Potential providers of highways assets and associated data will be informed through Balfour, Carillion and InTouch's links to the highways industry. In particular, InTouch currently lead the UK's intelligent gully cleaning market and have a system that is in use in over 1M of the UK's 14M gullies. The inclusion of the Transport Systems Catapult also provides an important new route for dissemination and impact as they provide a conduit to a wide range of stakeholders.
Academic dissemination will be led by Lancaster University and all the project partners will actively engage in dissemination activities. Full details of the partner's plans for impact and exploitation are described in the InnovateUK proposal.