By Steve Mooney
To be in a position to maintain an asset it is first necessary to understand its condition and that is where digitalisation offers significant benefits to asset managers.
Condition assessment has traditionally been a manual exercise conducted in person by asset managers, or in teams depending on the size of the asset, but this is an area where new digital tools can deliver much greater efficiencies.
The digital tools solve several challenges. In a sector with skill shortages digital condition assessment can be a major time saver, delivering data remotely from the field and enabling asset managers to focus on the value added aspects of their role.
Digital tools are also able to send up to date data on asset condition in real time, giving asset managers more timely and accurate information to act upon.
For New Zealand, which ranks in the bottom 10% of countries in the OECD in terms of what it delivers for each dollar spent on infrastructure, digital tools present as a way to improve returns on investment.
As Martina Moroney, the Advocacy and Strategy Lead for Infrastructure New Zealand, put it in a recent article, digitalisation isn’t a “magic fix, but an improved use of digital tools can help us be smarter about how we invest, plan, maintain and renew our infrastructure.”
She takes a wider look at the potential benefits of digitalisation, but makes key points about the importance of data which are also at the heart of digital condition assessment.
“Enhancements that would enable greater uptake of digital technologies could include; championing and communicating use cases, data governance framework development, uplift in government digitalisation, resource sharing and industry collaboration and coordination, AI integration and investment in research and development,” Moroney wrote.
The positive news is that there are number of innovative startup companies in Australasia which are tackling these issues in a practical way, using technologies such as the cloud, artificial intelligence and automation.
VAPAR, for example, is a Sydney based startup founded in 2018 which uses these technologies to detect defects in sewer and stormwater pipes from video inspection footage, significantly improving accuracy and efficiency.
Owners of this kind of infrastructure often have a limited amount of financial resources, and want to keep the pipes in service for as long as possible so ongoing maintenance and repair is crucial to prevent degradation.
VAPAR operates AI on a Microsoft platform to find all the defects and deliver a root cause analysis, and then recommends remedial action which flows into a decision making process which is tracked through to completion.
The AI solution reduces timescales needed to review the footage, and also lowers costs.
A number of local government authorities in Australasia are already leveraging the VAPAR solution, which has been implemented at the Blacktown City Council in Sydney, TRILITY in New Zealand and also in the UK with Northumbrian Water, among others.
In Maitland in New South Wales, the council is implementing a condition assessment project for the road network, using AI technology to see where road maintenance efforts are most needed.
Maitland City Council has engaged engineering firm SHEPHERD to complete the survey using their Road Asset Condition Assessment System (RACAS), which will involve cameras assessing both sealed and unsealed roads.
RACAS captures high definition images every 10 metres, as well as GPS and roughness data, to electronically produce a condition rating of the pavement while the AI software automatically logs road defects.
In the New Zealand capital Wellington, meanwhile, the council has embarked on a project to digitise and map the city’s underground assets on a central database.
The Wellington Underground Asset Map will ultimately digitise information on water assets, telecommunication cables, gas pipes and other services.
The move is a project to better manage the labyrinth of underground pipes and cables which are at the core of the city’s infrastructure.
It may not be a condition assessment project in its first phase, but aggregating the data and digitally mapping the assets will enable further integration with the new generation of AI based condition assessment solutions.
It all goes back to the old adage that you “can’t improve what you can’t measure”, and while humans asset managers will always be the ones making the decisions on improvements they can increasingly rely on digital tools to do the measuring.
