Utilities Business Review: Specials Magazine

Today, the United States is home to several hundred miles of drinking water pipeline systems. The chances for breaks and leakages of those pipelines are high, primarily due to aging infrastructure and wear and tear, among other reasons. These are conventionally dealt with by excavating the soil and physically evaluating the condition of water pipe systems. However, the time, cost, and labor in digging up and replacing them demand herculean efforts from utility companies. Can this challenge be addressed more proactively? Hideki Okada, CEO of Fracta, says, “Yes!” “We are here to solve the hardest riddle of water utilities with our affordable digital solution that accurately predicts infrastructure failures, thereby preventing unnecessary, expensive and long-haul pipeline inspections.” Fracta is a California-based leading provider of AI-based software platforms that monitors and analyzes the break patterns, target leakages, and failure scenarios of pipe networks. Owned by Kurita Water Industries of Japan, the company helps utilities prioritize efficient water pipe replacements. Its cutting-edge technology helps them better understand the underground conditions and improve the overall reliability of water mains. “By leveraging our utility network database, we bring to the table more of a data-driven pipe condition assessment that goes beyond traditional pipe age and break history models, to identify failure risk of pipe segments” says Ted Sindabizera Ntwari, Product Manager of Fracta. Fracta’s platform comprises condition assessment solutions that leverage machine learning(ML) and advanced analytics technologies: the likelihood of failure (LOF) and the consequence of failure (COF). These advanced tools calculate the correlation between historical breaks and local conditions of pipes. Fracta’s LOF prediction model lists out the individual risk factors of pipe segments and the probability of their failures in scores. Utilities can therefore verify planning and identify the pipes that need to be replaced, ensuring good pipes are left in the ground. Moreover, the COF data-driven model analyzes the financial implications of pipe breaks by creating their failure scenarios. It makes utilities manage direct and indirect costs to improve recovery planning. Fracta’s BRE tool visualizes the overall business risk exposure using dynamic graphs and charts to connect the dots between the probability of break events and their financial effects. Further, the company’s Job Planner tool combines the LOF and COF results and creates optimized repair and replacement plans to restore the weakest parts of water networks. This assists utilities to be more proactive rather than reactive in optimizing the capital improvement project (CIP) planning.

RADIAN Research, Inc. is a world-leading provider of electric energy measurement instruments, systems, software, and services for electric utility meter engineering, laboratory, shop and site testing applications. By 1982, Glenn A. Mayfield, Founder of RADIAN Research saw a coming technology gap in the electric utility industry. He believed that the development of superior measurement reference standards was the only reliable way to test and calibrate the emerging electric energy revenue billing meters. An electrical measurement physicist, Mayfield instilled these principles into the primary mission of RADIAN Research. Today, RADIAN is synonymous with STANDARD in electric meter shops and laboratories across North America. Building on that legacy, RADIAN Research continues to bring its best innovations, technologies, and exemplary customer support services to the table. RADIAN products ensure the integrity of electric energy measurement for the commerce of electricity in over 50 countries. “RADIAN Energy Reference Standards are used by more Electric Utility Companies, Electric Meter Manufacturers and National Metrology Institutes to provide energy measurement certainty than any other brand” says Tim Everidge, President and CEO, RADIAN Research. Meter Testing Paves Way for Full Cycle Metering Asset Management Utilities have dealt with large volumes of data since the dawn of electricity distribution and metering. In over 100 years, the scale of data has grown exponentially with the dramatic increase in the number of metering endpoints and metered quantities. As this data increased, utilities developed their own systems and processes to collect, store, and analyze the data. However, the sheer magnitude and complexity of data interactions involved in today’s utility environment very quickly outgrow the capabilities of these homegrown solutions. RADIAN offers utility software solutions that range from a simple meter test tool that runs and stores data on a single test station to an enterprise-level meter test data and asset management platform that delivers complete lifecycle data to devices across multiple locations and operating companies. The highly reliable, configurable and scalable WATT-Net^TM Meter Test Data and Asset Management software platform serves the testing and energy measuring needs of meter shops and field-testing operations. WATT-Net enables utilities to test and document the accuracy of energy billing devices such as electricity meters and transformers.