Veolia & Knox City Council Case Study

About the client

The Wurundjeri and the Bunurong have cared for Knox's creeks, hills and plains for thousands of years.The Kulin Nation (Knox City) region covers Central Victoria around Port Phillip Bay. It also moves into the upper reaches of the Goulburn and Lodden Rivers.Today Knox is home to over 160,000 people, living in approximately 58,000 homes. Around a quarter of which were born overseas. With $288.9M of stormwater assets covering 1,176 km.

Project Snapshot

As part of Knox Council's $1.2B asset management plan, Veolia was engaged to inspect & maintain the council's stormwater assets in conjunction with their road resurfacing projects. VAPAR.Solutions platform was requested as part of the tender process, to efficiently deliver & report asset grades. Large asset management project, assessing stormwater assets in adjacent roadside during the resurfacing project, key to grade the assets that may require rehab & renewal. As such, speed of inspection reporting is key to building stormwater asset management.

The Challenge & Opportunity

During the process of Knox Council’s road management project, the standard of stormwater assets infrastructure is fundamental to limiting the disruption of rain events, such as flooding or collapse, upon the road network.By inspecting and reporting on connected stormwater assets as the road surface project is underway, Veolia could continually update Knox Council with asset condition reports that may be prioritised for current or future works plans. This requires the Veolia team to make inspection reporting outcomes available quickly & efficiently to Knox Council.

The Solution

VAPAR.Solutions has multiple features designed to make the delivery of inspection footage as quickly as possible. Inspection footage is uploaded from any internet-connected device, direct to Azure cloud storage. Allowing Veolia access to the footage, once processed by the Machine Learning (ML) algorithm, from any location. Knox council initially have full visibility that an inspection has been uploaded, including the asset meta-data, such as Asset ID, upstream / downstream nodes and length. Veolia is then able to review the footage to quickly be allocated key features (Start / End node, General photograph) or defects (cracking, displacement, infiltration etc).Once reviewed by Veolia these inspections are fully accessible by Knox council – including video download & playback, PDF report, and Asset & Defect CSV’s.

Veolia can allocate (if required) a series of repair recommendations that align to the reported defects occurring within the asset. Repair recommendations can be viewed singularly by asset or exported as a CSV to effectively build rehabilitation & renewal plans – filtering by repair type, asset material and/or diameter.This delivery system allows Veolia inspections in the field to be performed without time spent coding. Fully accessible cloud storage makes the inspection available to code at any internet-connected location, with immediate project visibility to the council. Once reviewed, Knox Council can make review the grade outcomes from defect allocations, assess repair recommendations made and quickly allocate to a priority status, such as Decision, Repair Plan or Complete.

Results

Veolia completed almost 900 inspections over ~20 km’s of assets.Separating these inspections into 32 location-named folders, to allow effective data management for the Knox council team. The Veolia VIC team were able to deliver an average of 2.8 days for an inspection upload to review completion. With over 3400 defects reported across the 897 inspections. A large proportion of these are allocated as circumferential cracking, roots, surface damage and deposits amongst others. Of the total 900 inspections, 179 of these were identified as Structural Grade 4+ and 157 as Service Grade 4+, identified as high-priority grading.Knox council team were able to allocate ~260 assets into a repair plan status, with designated repair recommendations from Veolia within the platform.Of the repair recommendations made, 15 assets require re-lining over a total length of 900 m. 131 (largely concrete) assets require patching with a total of 400+ recommended patches across diameter ranges of 225 to 750 mm pipe.

Conclusions

To deliver Stormwater asset inspection reports as part of Knox Council's road-resurfacing projects (part of a greater asset management plan), Veolia have utilised VAPAR.Solutions to deliver & review ~900 inspections over almost 20 km’s of total chainage.Uploading directly into VAPAR’s cloud storage and reviewing entirely within the platform, Veolia can quickly deliver inspection reporting to Knox Council within a few hours of upload processing. Including access to PDF reports, video playback and asset repair recommendations (Contractor suggested).Veolia has been able to identify 179+ assets of priority structural grade of 4 or 5 & 157 of service grade 4 or 5. Allowing Knox Council to allocate a designated repair plan of 260 assets. Multiple CSV exporting capabilities enable a simple review of the allocated defects (3400 total) and required repairs, to enable the process of initial repair/rehab costing estimates between Veolia and Knox Council.