Dutch drinking water company Dunea serves 1.4 million residents in the province of Zuid-Holland, the Netherlands. In the forecasts of Dunea, water shortage is a realistic threat to the impeccable delivery of the water requested by clients as from 2030. Minimising the number of leakages will contribute to the mitigation of this risk. In addition, Dunea aims to reduce the efforts for the staff working on maintenance and repair, and to reduce the impact of leakages on the enviroment.
Dunea has explored new ways to prioritise pipes for replacement and to facilitate the dialogue between the board of Dunea and the asset manager and asset engineers. Dunea has requested Spatial Insight to pilot risk modelling algorithm SI-Rehab and decision support software BestNet.

Approach and Solution
After a thorough data security assessment by Dunea, we installed our software on a server provided by Dunea, and we configured the connections with the Dunea Data Platform. When data could be exchanged smoothly, we run SI-Regression and created the average failure frequency for the different pipe cohorts, see an example of results below. SI-Regression and SI-Cluster are the main inputs in the calculation of the probability of failure in SI-Rehab. Effect scores were calculated and multiplied with the probability of failure for each pipe segment in the network. BestNet enables the combination of different pipe replacement models. Upon request of asset manager Maurice van de Roer, we generated included SI-Rehab results, ‘SI-Rehab_probability only’ results and ‘SI-Rehab_effect only’ results in BestNet. By doing so, we gave Maurice the opportunity to play around and see the effect of different choices on the future performance of the network.

The results were useful and considered to be an attractive alternative for the existing software currently used by Dunea.
Contribution to Strategic Objectives
SI-Rehab is a tool that -in a transparant way- prioritises the pipes in the network for replacement. This is an important step in the optimal assignment of investment budgets for pipe renewal. BestNet facilitates the conversation between the asset manager and the board of the company. It gives managers insights in the consequences of increasing or decreasing the investment budgets for pipe renewal.
Customer review
Maurice van de Roer is Dunea’s asset manager: “I have found the collaboration with Spatial Insight particularly pleasant. Because the employees come from the drinking water sector, they understand our problems and challenges and have practical solutions in their tools. Finally, they are very customer-oriented and flexible, allowing specific adjustments or wishes to be implemented very quickly.”
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"We are grateful and proud that Dunea has decided to continue to work with us after the pilot"