As part of its endeavors to find innovative sanitation management solutions, South Korea’s capital, Seoul, recently announced the start of a new plan to develop wastewater treatment facilities using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automate the operation and management of these facilities. This plan complements a project previously launched by the city aimed at detecting malfunctions in the drainage network through artificial intelligence techniques.
Wastewater treatment is one of the most important challenges facing local governments and municipalities due to the consequent hard work, high costs and large energy consumption. As well as the technical and operational complexities during the multiple stages that wastewater goes through during treatment. Traditional means of managing wastewater recycling facilities in Seoul rely entirely on labour. Where employees constantly monitor processing processes, Review the data issued by it, Then analyze them manually so that they can make decisions that ensure that services continue without downtime. But sometimes heavy reliance on labour causes errors or accidents that can result from staff delays or misjudgments of certain issues.
All these factors have prompted the Seoul city government to search for innovative solutions that reduce effort and costs. This resulted in the adoption of a new plan to transform four sewage treatment facilities in the city into “smart centers” that facilitate water recycling through fully automated systems. The project will be implemented in three phases to be completed in 2030, The first phase began this year and will end in 2022 when an integrated database, a central monitoring system and another remote operations follow-up system are established.
Where the integrated database includes a central server (server), Its function is to collect and preserve the data necessary to monitor and manage the operations of the wastewater treatment center. Also, the preservation of this data will lead in the future to the establishment of a database of big data for artificial intelligence technologies to analyze and follow up in real time to develop the operations of processing centers, This is what the Seoul government hopes to be able to manage operations automatically and intelligently.
As for the central monitoring system, it seeks to establish a central focus for the collection and display of data collected from the four facilities so that the concerned staff can remotely observe the overall status of water treatment and management and respond to emergencies through mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. But the Seoul government first needs to invest in digitally connecting the four utilities and the resulting data and collecting them in one place. This feature is currently unavailable.
The second phase will complete the development and improvement of systems based on the data and evidence collected between 2023 and 2027. As for the third and final phase, which will begin in 2028 and end in 2030, It will see the completion of the project after ensuring that the facilities are fully automated using artificial intelligence technologies that feed into the big data collected over the years of the project.
The Seoul government’s plan aims to achieve several economic and environmental gains. The most important of which is reducing dependence on labor in wastewater treatment processes, Reduce operating costs for utilities. The Government also hopes that this step will lead to higher efficiency and transparency. This would ensure the quality of its operation and its systematic and reliable management. The new smart system is also expected to reduce energy consumption in wastewater treatment facilities and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is done by automatically organizing facility operations so that equipment is turned off when it is no longer needed.
This plan complements the previous systems announced by the Seoul city government at the beginning of 2021, which are represented in another system that will also rely on artificial intelligence to automatically detect any malfunctions or water leakage accidents from the city’s sewage network. Using surveillance cameras and computer vision techniques, which in turn help computers identify faults based on “machine learning” techniques, These technologies enable systems to recognize images, identify any suspicious elements indicating any malfunction or damage and know their location in the network, An alert is then sent to the inspectors responsible for monitoring the progress of the work.
The pilot project of this system was launched in 2020 after being developed by the Seoul Digital Foundation of the city government. Through machine learning techniques, it trained the system to identify 10 types of malfunctions through 5,000 visual recordings captured by surveillance cameras. In early 2021, the pilot project was successfully implemented in two neighborhoods of the capital, The organization is now training the system to identify 19 types of malfunctions that are likely to occur in sewage systems. The new system is scheduled to be implemented in all Seoul districts in 2022.
The innovative solution is expected to shorten the long working hours spent by inspectors scrutinizing thousands of images for faults in the 9,000-kilometer sewer network. Which may not be without errors. The system’s ability to detect malfunctions in the early stages of their occurrence will enable the city to take preventive measures to prevent the situation from worsening.
References:
https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/news/news/seoul-uses-ai-to-detect-faults-in-citys-sewer-pipes-6558
