Coordinated by Burgas Municipality.
Water Infrastructure Planning & Maintenance
đź“Ť Burgas, Bulgaria
About the pilot
Burgas Municipality has been heavily investing in the development of a safe and efficient water supply and sanitisation infrastructures, as reflected in recent initiatives, including: (i) The provision of a 32.4 million EUR loan to Burgas Water Supply and Sanitation Operator (“Burgas WSSO”), which is aimed at the co-financing of investments in the infrastructure Burgas WSSO is a state-owned company and sole provider of water supply, wastewater collection and treatment services in the Burgas region; (ii) The recent (March 2021) approval of an investment of over €63 million EUR from the Cohesion Fund to provide better access to drinking water and improved sewerage for the people living in the district of Burgas. In the scope of the AI4PublibPolicy pilot, EKSO and BURGAS will collaborate in the development of a policy making tool that will create and evaluating alternative water pipes maintenance plans, based on data-driven insights about the water management infrastructure (e.g., information about pipes’ installation, placement, and maintenance) and its operative condition (i.e., leveraging EKSO pipes).
Use Cases
- Data-Driven Maintenance Costs and Sustainability Analysis for Water Pipes: Leveraging data about the water management networks (i.e. pipes installation & placement) different maintenance schedules will be analyzed from a financial perspective, including service, repair and maintenance costs for the pipes that comprise the water infrastructure. In this direction, specific segments of the infrastructure may be selected for analysis in the scope of the project. Furthermore, alternative maintenance schedules will be analyzed in terms of their cost and environmental impact, towards recommending and selecting the best possible scenarios;
- Condition-based Monitoring and LCA for Maintenance and Repair policies: This use case will extend the previous one with condition-based monitoring data for water pipes, towards extending their lifecycle and improving maintenance schedule. In this direction, the data-driven analysis will be extended with sensor-data derived by EKSO pipes. The analysis will blend information from the previous use cases with lab based data from EKSO with a view to evaluating the added-value of smart pipes and condition-based maintenance for policy making. Each of the use cases will consider citizens’ feedback and satisfaction about specific maintenance plans, which will be collected through on-line surveys.
- Use of remote controlled water consumption meters and their integration in a smart platform in order to monitor and control water use: Telecom, A1, has provided 30 devices to install in the water usage meters of public buildings, including schools and kindergartens as well as meters linked to systems used for watering city parks and gardens. The devices will be able to display real-time data on a platform, which can also be fed into the AI of the project in order to generate public policies related to water consumption and limiting water wastage.
User Stories
| Â No. | Type of user | Goal | Reason |
| #1 | WSSO executive | I want to know the amount of water lost due to pipe bursts or leakages | to ensure sufficient operational pressure in the pipes so that quality services can be provided |
| #2 | Water Supply Manager for the neighborhood | I want to know the geographical distribution of leakages/illegal connections | so that I can stop them and to plan prevention activities |
| #3 | Resident | I want good constant pressure, quality, and affordability of the water. | to have a good quality of life |
| #4 | WSSO public relations manager | I want adopt a more advanced maintenance strategy/policy | so I can maximise efficiency of maintenance activity reducing maintenance cost and service interruption. |
| #5 | Burgas Municipality | As the owner of the water supply and sewerage networks, the municipality wants the cost of maintenance to be kept as low possible | because this affects the price of water and allows for the social peace to be kept |
| #6 | WSSO Engineer | I want to assess our technological capacities | so that realistic goals and development plans are made |
| #7 | WSSO Technical Manager | I want to have planned repair works on the network | so that citizens are not so impacted by it |
| #8 | WSSO Engineer | I want to undergo a digital transformation | so that we improve customer service delivery |
| #9 | WSSO Engineer | I want to adopt smart water technologies and using AI to analyze large quantity of data | so that it frees up specialists time to work on something else and receive unbiased data results |
Co-creation workshops
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