Finalist award: £49,677
Winner award: £436,286
Led by: digiLab Solutions Limited
Project completed: March 2025
Project Overview
senSiteUQ optimises sensor placement in wastewater networks to maximise information about complex water systems, providing value for water companies and customers in England and Wales. Using smart technology and machine learning, our transparent and scientific approach allows rapid and accurate sensor deployment, with an understanding of potential weak points and associated risk exposure. digiLab’s extensive customer discovery work clearly shows the sector wants to understand the state of the sewer network. Getting quality data is key to reducing overflows and flooding.
The sector is heavily fined, and customer satisfaction is poor, especially for people living near water. In 2023 Southern Water installed 20,000 wastewater sensors at an estimated TOTEX cost of £700,000 per week. Our conversations have shown that sector experts in the UK, US and EU are still surprised when they hear one company has 20,000 sensors; they assume that scaling deployment is too costly. Having sensors in sewers means that we can see what is happening and react to incidents and maintenance. We can make predictions too but, to do that, we must understand the constantly changing state of the network. We need to know where to look, which way to look and the trade-off between understanding the network at a given moment and the cost of sensors, their deployment and maintenance.
Our senSiteUQ sensor placement tool puts sensors into the network at the right place and looking the right way, by bringing together data and risk layers with operational constraints. We drew on our work in the nuclear industry, a deep-dive into published research and customer experience to create a transparent and scientific machine learning solution which exposes risk. Most importantly, this approach provides the best data quality.
Managing the flow of water reduces sewage spills and flooding and consequently minimises fines. Clean water, better public health, resilience from adverse events keeping road networks running smoothly – these are just some of the benefits for customers and society, while fewer pollution incidents protect the natural environment and our delicate ecosystems. We plan to provide senSiteUQ to water companies by catchment and we will continue working within the industry to understand platform interoperability, and sensor manufacturers for digital transformation. Knowing exactly what’s going on underground using quality data is key to successful network performance. Using our transparent and scientific methods to sensor sewers for the best quality data will reduce spills, protect the environment and provide value for money for customers. digiLab’s senSiteUQ tool will provide confidence from the very start of the journey towards end-to-end network management.
DigiLab Solutions was announced as one of 10 winners in the Water Discovery Challenge on 20 February 2024 – read more in the announcement blog.
For more information on senSiteUQ: Sensible Sensor Siting, take a look at the following resources:
