DC Water and IBM– A Case Study in Analytics

DC Water suppliers water to 2 million customers in the Washington DC area with several thousand miles of pipes (with an average age of over 75 years) and maintains nearly 9000 fire hydrants.  Several years ago, everything was tracked on paper.

IBM and DC Water have recently published several videos and articles on how DC Water has applied descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics to the system with positive results.

This is a nice case study in the use of analytics.

The descriptive analytics allowed DC Water to map the location of the fire hydrants for better maintenance.  With extra sensors it also allowed them to better monitor water useage and look for anomalies

With aging pipes, the predictive analytics allowed them to predict failures before they happened.

And, the prescriptive analytics allowed DC Water to better route maintenance crews to fix trouble tickets increasing the productivity of the maintenance team while driving down fuel cost.

IBM published several videos on the solution>

This first video is a nice high-level overview of the solution:

The second video provides more details of the solution:

The third video highlights the predictive analytics solution:

 

IBM also published a written document of the solution, but I found the videos very well done.

Advertisement