Mueller introduces Piperank virtual condition assessment service for water pipelines
The PipeRank technology, powered by VODA.ai and delivered by Echologics, is designed to predict future failures more accurately than age-based estimates or the prior failure models that are used today.
“Ageing infrastructure continues to present challenges to cities around the world,” said Chad Mize, senior vice president, sales and marketing at Mueller. “Mueller is focused on developing and delivering advanced data-driven solutions to help water utilities address these challenges leveraging technology that enables them to make critical operational decisions.”
The PipeRank technology identifies pipe segments that are likely to fail in the future and assigns a corresponding business risk score.
A condition assessment is then performed on the pipelines using the Echologics ePulse technology to diagnose specific problems. This condition assessment makes it easy for utilities to plan operating and engineering programmes by tailoring their course of action; capital expenditures; and focus their resources on the highest risk assets.
“Current industry best practice is to leverage as much desktop data as possible to identify trends and generate data-supported decisions for failure planning and capital deployment. The PipeRank technology pairs available pipe degradation factors with a proprietary machine learning model to prioritize every pipe segment analysed by likelihood and consequence of failure,” added Eric Stacey, vice president and general manager of Echologics.