The situation:
Pipeageddon,
the $1 trillion
infrastructure problem.

By 2050, the American Water Works Association (AWWA) estimates the United States alone will spend an estimated $1 trillion to address rehabilitation and replacement of buried water pipes. The more than one million miles of buried pipe are aging and many pipelines are expected to reach their end of useful life within the next 25-30 years.

US water utilities are experiencing 240,000 breaks each year. A recent study by Utah State University found that water main breaks in the US and Canada have increased 27% over the past six years. Service interruptions, soaring costs, pressure to raise water rates and the strain on available resources is unprecedented and is expected to worsen in the near future.

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A New Approach:
AI. It’s fast, accurate and affordable.

As a field of computational analysis, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been defined for decades but has only blossomed in the last 5-10 years with the emerging abundance of available big data, connected computing power and standardized algorithms. AI is now being used to solve technical problems from autonomous driving to medical diagnosis of disease to climate change predictions.

Fracta is applying AI to asset management and the aging water infrastructure problem in the United States. Fracta developed a faster, more accurate and affordable method of pinpointing which buried water mains are most likely to break and cause expensive, disruptive service interruptions.

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The Solution:
A cloud-based condition assessment solution using AI.

Fracta offers a Software as a Service (SaaS) application to assess the condition of drinking water distribution mains. Fracta calculates and visualizes the Likelihood of Failure (LOF) for every water main pipe segment. The LOF score represents the mathematical probability of pipe failure, enabling utilities to make better pipe replacement decisions.

Most water utilities have pipe, geographical data and break history. What’s more, federal, state and local organizations maintain stores of environmental data. There is no shortage of data needed to assess the condition of water main pipes. It would be almost impossible for a human to comprehend all the possible relationships between these data. Fracta employs Artificial Intelligence models to collect, organize and make sense of it all. From there, volumes of data relating to water main pipes, their break history, geography and the environment (e.g., soils, climate) is fed into the Fracta solution, identifying which pipes have the highest LOF.

Fracta’s objective, big data-driven method is faster, more accurate and more affordable than other desktop and physical condition assessment methods.

There is no limit to the potential of artificial intelligence. Today, we are focused on water. Tomorrow, gas, electricity, fiber optics and transportation – the list goes on.