Optimising interventions addressing rising groundwater nitrate concentrations

The key objective was to pilot a resilience framework with optimization in a real and practical environment and understand the capability needs for scalability across the region. This project suggests a 20-50% CAPEX and OPEX savings or budget stretch is possible.

Arcadis helped develop an industry-leading resilience framework which translated into Southern Water. Optimatics configured bespoke functionality to integrate this framework into Optimizer™, allowing multiobjective optimization between cost, performance, and resilience.

The key business drivers of this project were to improve system redundancy, address rising groundwater nitrate concentration risks, and address rising costs of nitrate removal with the most cost-effective asset locations for the Thanet Network.

Southern Water, ARCADIS, and Optimatics worked collaboratively to develop and apply new functionality relevant to this application. Through the process, Southern Water gained a better understanding of the needs and possibilities of working with Optimizer™.

The project has been an opportunity to test asset mix options, provide better clarity of Southern Water’s needs, and engage other stakeholders in the business.

There were various iterations of the methodology as learnings emerged through formulating the problem and reviewing results. The problem was thus able to be explored in much more detail than what was possible before using Optimizer™.

On a performance vs cost basis, Southern Water was able to find asset combinations 20-50 times cheaper than their previously defined plan. In addition, the solutions were evaluated more comprehensively in terms of their hydraulic and water quality performance.

The multi-objective optimization allowed the conjunctive consideration of network resilience Understanding how resilience changed with cost allowed Southern Water to quantify a meaningful step-change in resilience and define how it could be achieved.

The bespoke resilience methodology developed by Arcadis was incorporated into the Optimizer™ platform, enabling multi-objective optimization of water quality, hydraulic performance, network resilience, and cost.

Significant cost savings were achieved through the project, and a transparent and scalable methodology was developed that Southern Water could replicate in other networks.