Adaptative Pathways for Leakage

Following the recent publication of the regional water resources plans and last week’s Water UK Routemap for Leakage to 2050, the move to adaptive pathways for leakage planning is more apparent than ever. To ensure that leakage managers across the UK have a toolset that adapts to their needs, RPS has developed their Frontier Leakage Optimisation (FLO) tool to assist with this changing landscape in the industry.

Michael Butler, Technical Manager

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UK

RPS began developing Frontier Leakage Optimisation in 2017 following a successful collaborative project with 7 water companies including United Utilities, Yorkshire Water, Affinity Water and Bristol Water. The objective of this was to look at how the increasing leakage targets of PR19 could be achieved in the most economical way. Since then, the team have been developing the FLO toolset to adapt to the challenges that have been set by the National Infrastructure Commission and Public Interest Commitment.

Ofwat and Environmental Agency planning for the upcoming regulatory round has also set new challenges with the inclusion of the adaptive pathways approach especially for water resources - this was enforced by the recent regional water resources plans and the Water UK ‘A Routemap for Leakage to 2050’.

Based on these needs, FLO has been developed further to assist leakage managers to identify not only the current best strategy for each DMA in their network based on historical performance, DMA characteristics and current overall leakage position, but now also provides insight to assist with when a change in pathway is required.

FLO now uses historical data, externality data, natural rate of rise calculations as well as background leakage estimations to provide a sensitivity around the current strategy and its likelihood of success for the current year. This provides insight to the leakage managers to determine if a change of strategy is required or to test the sensitivity of success around external factors like a harsh winter.

If a change in direction is required, then the FLO optimisation can be used to determine the new approach at a DMA level, taking into account deliverability, benefit realisation time and total cost. This insight provides a method that can be used either within year to help to achieve target, or as part of the planning process for upcoming years to adjust for over or under performance.