AUTHOR
Related Topics
Condition Monitoring
Data Integration
Leak Detection
Early Flood Warning
The Norwegian municipality of Lillestrøm has 87,500 residents and is located at the confluence of three rivers (Glomma, Nitelva, and Leira) creating the largest inland delta in Northern Europe, surrounded by the nature reserve Øyeren.
THE CHALLENGE
To the environmental engineers at Lillestrøm municipality, water presents both a wealth of recreation opportunities and a challenge to protect waterways, manage wastewater, and keep the inhabitants, human and wildlife, safe from the effects of flooding.
The municipality already had the infrastructure in place to manage water flows and related equipment. Teams would operate based on weather forecasts and emerging environmental conditions to start and stop pumps, open gates, fix equipment, and gather data. However, the whole process was reactive and the information they had to work with was often imprecise, uncoordinated, and sometimes too late to be useful.
THE SOLUTION
InfoTiles aggregates real-time streamed data from Azure IoT (internet of things) sensors throughout complex monitoring networks, connects maintenance equipment, integrates control systems, and uses open-source connectors to collect and share data with previously siloed environments.
The InfoTiles platform can ingest data from any source and readily add, remove, or configure other data sources. Hagen and Berg incorporated a database to map and track key features in the Lillestrøm water and wastewater network, such as water temperatures and flows, and the current status of some 3 million meters of pipe.
RESULTS
With the InfoTiles platform, engineering works are targeted with greater accuracy, meaning smarter decisions on maintenance and repairs can be made and priorities better identified. The engineering team has seen a boost in the effectiveness and efficiency of its operations and, in turn, an improvement in the safety and well-being of the citizens of Lillestrøm.
- By remotely monitoring and predicting which pipes or pumps need replacing engineers can make more informed and proactive decisions before sending workers on-site. This saves time and money by identifying the problem immediately and dispatching the right crews with the information they need.
- Fixing a single pipe leak of 500 millilitres per second can prevent a recurring monthly loss in the range of €2,600. With Norway experiencing an average water loss through leaky pipes of 30-40%, the savings could be substantial.
- The early warning signs from flow and level sensors upstream, combined with weather sensors and predictive traffic algorithms, enable workers to reroute traffic ahead of time with signage and adjust signalling. This avoids excessively long round trips from closed roads that had plagued drivers and, most importantly emergency services, in the past.
– Erlend Berg, Enterprise Architect, Municipality of LillestrømWe didn’t have to use one platform for the data, a second for visualisation, and a third for making sense of it all. With the InfoTiles solution built on Azure, we have an end-to-end solution from IoT sensors to visualisation; the act-on-fact principle is closer to us than ever before.
