Sydney Water - creating smart digital assets

By Shane Reilly and Angela Lu | Sydney Water

As Australia’s largest water utility, Sydney Water is proud to service their communities with some of the best water services in the world. They supply more than five million customers across Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra region with safe, high-quality drinking water. Sydney Water also looks after wastewater, recycled water, and some stormwater services to ensure their communities can enjoy healthy rivers and clean beaches.

At Sydney Water, we are committed to our vision: Create a better life through world class water services. We do this through our strategic objectives:

· First choice of customers & partners

· High-performance culture

· Thriving, liveable & sustainable cities

· Successful & innovative business

Sydney Water is embarking on a Digital Engineering (DE) transformation starting with the DE framework. The framework aims to provide time, cost, and quality improvements to the way assets are planned, designed, constructed, operated, and maintained. Sydney Water is focussed on ‘here and now’ improvement areas as well as the digitisation and future proofing of the organisation.

Sydney Water will achieve this via the generation and management of digital representations of their physical assets focussing on information modelling (Smart design, construction & handover) and Digital Twin (Smart Asset Information Management, Planning, Operations & Maintenance).

Smart Delivery – Information Modelling

The development of a DE maturity matrix will change the way we work and deliver projects. This will generate efficiencies in the way we design, construct and hand over smart digital assets, and it will be crucial in supporting the DE vision.

Smart Asset Information Management, Planning, Operations & Maintenance – Digital Twin

As part of the DE journey, Sydney Water is developing Digital Twin Pilots. This is a collaborative effort targeting information management, planning, operations and maintenance, and customers. The pilots also aim to contribute to the enabling of Smart Cities capabilities and circular economy products and services.

The Smart Cities Digital Twin Challenge is enabling Sydney Water to share key learnings and collaborate with industry experts to accelerate government leadership for Digital Twin action and investment.

Sydney Water will be participating in all projects with a particular focus on the following:

· An organisational Digital Twin Strategy

· Digital Twin for city planning and design

· Digital Twin asset optimisation framework

· A model for Digital Twin data management

· Digital Twin as a data exchange platform

· A GIS to Digital Twin roadmap

· AI as a driver for Digital Twin performance

· An IoT for Digital Twin strategy

Shane Reilly is the Digital Engineering Manager for Sydney Water and lead cohort member along with Digital Graduate Angela Lu.