Sydney Water, could cut pipe maintenance costs for water mains by a fifth - using data & modelling techniques

Great story half way down this page about the use of data by Sydney Water to reduce it's costs.

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/government-and-regulation/nictas-government-innovation-drive-funded-or-not.html

Providing public value

NICTA was set up to encourage collaboration between world-class ICT researchers — both home-grown and imported — and Australian industry. There’s much still to do in that regard. But its focus on large-scale national challenges has also led it to deliver public value in transport planning, health, emergency services, agriculture and more.

“They’re areas where we have huge public expenditure,” said Robertson. “Transport alone I think is about 14% of GDP, and if we can make that 10% more efficient, which we can, and we’ve demonstrated that in areas where we’ve engaged with transport companies, then that’s a huge impact, because that 10% can be applied elsewhere for greater benefit.”

He says the Intelligent Pipes project, in partnership with Sydney Water, could cut pipe maintenance costs for water mains by a fifth using sophisticated modelling techniques.

“The way we did that was we looked at all the data they had for their pipes — they had quite a lot — and looked at which pipes had historically failed and the data for that, and then used machine learning and data analytics to predict which pipes are going to fail next. And it turns out in broad terms, we can predict of the failures ahead of time much more often than they could using conventional techniques.”

The savings to Sydney Water alone are several times the cost of running the project; with the water mains costing well over $1 billion to maintain Australia wide, the gains from widespread deployment would be in the hundreds of millions.