Insight
From review to rehabilitation – how PipeInsights™ is reinvigorating wastewater pipes
Municipalities and industrial facilities everywhere are dealing with the daily reality of an infrastructure deficit. This means it is crucial that those who are responsible for maintaining essential infrastructure such as combined sewers, wastewater sewers, and storm drainage systems can find ways to quickly identify the worst performing infrastructure in the most critical locations.
Even better is being able to find pipes that are at the “sweet spot” of the deterioration curve – where you can rehabilitate pipes and extend the operational life far beyond the original design without the high digging and replacement costs.
This is where PipeInsights, from Digital AECOM, comes into play. PipeInsights uses artificial intelligence to automatically review hours and hours of sewer inspection footage, code it to NASSCO PACP standards, and give a very quick automated report on the conditions. The PipeInsights difference, over other AI platforms, is that it can analyze the results in a decision tree-based Rehabilitation Tool that exists within the PipeInsights platform. These output recommendations can help create an asset management plan that is fully customizable, tailored to fit whatever the local cost-base and available rehabilitation technologies can provide.
I can’t stress enough how significant these types of rehabilitation tools are to the municipalities I talk to on an almost-daily basis. There are many technologies on the market that offer the benefits of artificial intelligence to review sewer pipe conditions – although I haven’t seen any that are as quick as PipeInsights – but there are none that can take those condition reports and create a tailored and fully customizable asset management plan. For time and resource-constrained municipalities, it therefore gives them the opportunity to take full control of their asset management programs.
PipeInsights becomes an essential component in capital improvement programs because it automatically makes the condition reports available on a centralized GIS-enabled website. This allows everyone from the municipality to see in real-time where their assets are, what the current condition is, and seamlessly review the data and videos associated with those assets.
