When relying on a manual system to bill water carters for hydrant use was causing water loss and quality issues, South East Water brought its expert teams together to develop a new solution.
Emergency services depend on water hydrants to keep communities safe, but while firefighting is their primary function, these hydrants also enable water to be transported to areas outside the limitations of the network.
Private water carters in South East Water’s service area are required to report whenever they draw water from these hydrants for billing purposes. However, with more than 60,000 hydrants in its network, keeping track of this usage is a mammoth undertaking.
South East Water Product Development Manager, Ninad Dharmadhikari, explained that prior to 2012, water carters kept track of their fill via a paper-based log.
“We soon realised that’s not the most efficient way to go about it. Processing these logs required a lot of manual effort and it was prone to errors – it wasn’t sustainable in the long term,” Mr Dharmadhikari said.
“So, in 2012, we started the journey to develop a system called HydroTrak®. Initially a very basic system, now in 2024 it is much more complex, featuring real-time GPS reporting and complex geofencing algorithms. As part of the permit process, we install a little device on the dashboard of a water carter’s vehicle. Every time they fill from a hydrant, they simply press the button on the device and it sends a digital transaction message to our system, so we can ensure their bill is fair and accurate.”
HydroTrak is an IoT device that continuously logs and reports GPS coordinates via the cellular network to a designated online database server and was designed to be as minimally intrusive and as maintenance free as possible.
South East Water also developed an online portal that allowed water carters to track water usage across their fleet and automated the workflow of permit applications and HydroTrak installations.
A journey of continuous innovation
As part of the test and trial process, South East Water applied a robust, stage-gate research and development process, involving various prototypes and checkpoints at each stage to justify further business investment in developing the system.
During the process, the utility found that while the prototype units were a step up from the paper-based system, Mr Dharmadhikari said the organisation recognised there was still room for improvement.
South East Water found that a number of fills made by water carters were still going unreported, so the organisation continued to develop the HydroTrak device. After speaking with the drivers, Mr Dharmadhikari said that in most cases this lack of reporting wasn’t intentional, but rather the result of drivers forgetting to press the button on the HydroTrak device.
“What surprised us was the number of times this had happened, and that insight was enough to make the decision to develop a solution,” he said.
Another issue was that drivers had very little means of identifying which hydrants were suitable for their vehicle.
“If the pipe network underneath the hydrant is not the right size, then filling from that hydrant can unsettle sediment that might have accumulated in the pipe over time, leading to turbidity and potential water quality issues and complaints,” Mr Dharmadhikari said.
Without the means to easily identify these hydrants, there was an increased likelihood of drivers filling from unsuitable hydrants and no easy way for South East Water to trace these fills back to the vehicle.
A collaborative effort
To overcome the limitations of the early iterations of HydroTrak, South East Water devised a geofencing algorithm that could detect fills in real-time.
Mr Dharmadhikari said that developing a complex geofencing solution required a collective and coordinated effort from several areas of the business.
“We did our stakeholder engagement with various teams at South East Water – that’s when we pulled in our operational technology team as well, who are the owners of the HydroTrak technology, and their support was key to our success.
“Together, we envisaged an update to the system that would help solve the problem, and that update was the HydroTrak Geofencing system.”
This new generation of the technology leverages GPS data from the existing HydroTrak devices already installed in the carter’s vehicles, which is then fed into a sophisticated geofencing algorithm installed on a secure South East Water server.
This software is also connected to the GIS system via an application programming interface (API), which provides it with up-to-date location information for all the hydrants in South East Water’s network. The algorithm then uses these two data sets to detect fills in real-time and pinpoint the hydrant being used.
“The algorithm can identify stoppages that the vehicle makes in close to real-time. Of all those stoppages, it can then detect the ones that are likely to be fills – because not all of them are fills, some could just be a driver parked next to a hydrant, but in reality they’ve gone to a cafe nearby; or it could be that the driver is stuck in traffic or has stopped at traffic lights and there happens to be a hydrant nearby,” Mr Dharmadhikari said.
“The algorithm then considers all of these different scenarios to identify those stoppages that are highly likely to be fills, and when that happens, the server sends a message to the device installed in the vehicles, and that causes the device to issue an audible alert.”
Upon receiving the message from the system, the LED light on the HydroTrak device activates, indicating green for a suitable fill hydrant or red for an unsuitable one.
After two minutes, the device then makes a continuous beeping sound and drivers can either press the ‘fill’ button, which acknowledges that they are filling their tanker and generates billing data, or the reject button to acknowledge that they engaged in an activity near a hydrant but were not filling, which suppresses the sound and doesn’t charge the driver.
The system also actively tracks the number of times a vehicle rejects the detected fills or uses unsuitable hydrants, which then enables South East Water to carry out further investigations and to engage and learn with the water carters about their water usage practices and behaviours.
Mr Dharmadhikari said that prior to launching the updated software in 2022, the algorithm was developed over a series of prototype iterations.
“We quickly realised when we started looking into geofencing, that while the technology itself is not new, it hasn’t been applied in this context to solve this specific problem, so we had to do a lot of trials.”
The first stage was to develop a minimal investment proof-of‑concept geofencing algorithm, which was implemented using Python programming language and executed on a computer.
This early development iteration took GPS data and combined it with the GIS data to detect fills. South East Water then visually monitored a small group of water carters and compared the time of their fills with the results detected by the proof-of-concept algorithm.
While the results showed promise and proved the feasibility of the system, it was not yet able to detect fills in real time, nor send alerts to drivers.
“Off the back off that, we then developed a more mature system, which we called the Alpha prototype,” Mr Dharmadhikari said.
During this next stage, the algorithm was converted into a software service and hosted on a secure server.
This enabled the system to now detect fills in real time, distinguish between suitable and unsuitable hydrants and generate audible alerts.
“We had to do robust and exhaustive testing before we could even connect a single customer to this system,” Mr Dharmadhikari said.
“So, we first plugged these devices into our own vehicles and tested within our service region, parking next to hydrants to see if the system response is appropriate or not.”
The results from these trials not only demonstrated that the Geofencing system could successfully detect fills in real-time and send alerts to drivers, but also that the optimised algorithm could do so with greater accuracy.
Mr Dharmadhikari explained that throughout the innovation process, each iteration of the system was optimised based on feedback from internal stakeholders and users.
“As we were developing this system, one of the requirements that emerged was from our water quality protection teams was they wanted a way to assess if a turbidity issue was likely to be linked to use of an unsuitable hydrant,” he said.
“In partnership with our operational technology team, we upgraded our existing business portal. It has a map view, where you can see any customer complaints within each region, the metadata associated with those complaints and then any water carter activity in the area.”
Driving forward
In the final stages of development, South East Water recruited a small group of carter vehicles for a three‑month trial.
“In 2022, we connected 100 vehicles to the new system prior to launch to see if it was going to succeed. And through that trial group, we quickly saw a revenue improvement of around 36 per cent,” Mr Dharmadhikari said.
“We also issued a user experience survey to these drivers to see what the experience is like, and almost all of them said they appreciated that it was reminding them to push the button.”
Image: South East Water
With positive results from the trial and support from water carters, South East Water made the decision to commence a fleet-wide rollout in December 2022. In addition to saving an estimated 65ML of non-revenue water across its network, the latest generation of HydroTrak allowed most of the workflows relating to hydrant billing to be automated, reducing both manual input and errors.
Despite these strong results, Mr Dharmadhikari said that there is still scope for further innovation and an opportunity to harness the power of machine learning and AI.
“Machine learning models could further improve the accuracy of these detections to a point where we may not even need the driver to push the button,” he said.
According to Mr Dharmadhikari, the data collected from the HydroTrak Geofencing system could be used to train a machine learning algorithm, with South East Water planning to investigate the viability of this solution once the fleet-wide rollout is complete.
The current iteration of HydroTrak Geofencing is also only able to detect usage from permitted water carters, however, South East Water hopes to leverage its growing digital meter network to change this.
As the utility continues to digitise its network, the data provided by digital meters and leak detection sensors can be used in conjunction with the geofencing system to track and identify unexplained water usage and streamline audits.
While there is a bright future ahead for the further generations of HydroTrak, the technology is already enjoying international fame. HydroTrak claimed two titles in the Water Technology Excellence category at the 2024 Asian Water awards (Research and Development – Australia; and Water Resource Management – Australia) and was also Highly Commended for Research and Development Excellence at the 2024 AWA Victorian Water Awards.
