As part of their leakage reduction programme, the team at South East Water are looking for ways to improve targeting of leaks on their distribution mains using their existing data.  

This will enable the company to develop new ways to identify and prioritise leaks before bursts occur and better target their leak intervention teams.

Principle challenge

Using historical data, the hackathon provides an opportunity for interested parties to access a wealth of real-world data and demonstrate the value of their approach in two main areas:

• Development of new analysis models and tools for identifying and prioritising leakage events.
• Demonstrating new approaches to distribution main leakage management, with focus on identifying and prioritising 7-day and 60-day targets before mains failure.

The Hackathon will see teams form and compete. The objective to produce the most effective analysis model and/or to demonstrate the most effective identification and prioritisation insights. 

Why participate?

This is a great opportunity to demonstrate how you can offer collaborative solutions to leakage reduction challanges.

Engage with a large infrastucture organisation - South East Water have  revenue of £225 million.  The organisation invest heavily in regional skills, expertise and innovation. We are actively seeking enterprising organisations and novel analysis and prioritisation tools that can help us.

Collaborate with other disciplines and organisations - Hackathons are a great way to meet and work with a wider range of stakeholders including professional application developers, business leaders, academics and researchers as well as other groups.

Help to solve large scale real-world challenges - We are working to ensure our future services are safe, secure and offer best value to the public. Your involvement not only supports your local community but potentially could establish data innovations that have application across utility or infrastructure management.

Commercial potential and profile - Reducing leakage events and prioritising works are major issues faced by water utilities across the globe.  We are offering companies a unique opportunity to co-create commercial solutions with companies that have relevant sensors, systems and tools.

The resulting models and tools will belong to you. We may well wish to invest with you in developing some of these for application with our technical solutions partners and are ensuring a process is in place to take selected ideas forward. 

The event format

There will be prizes for the winning teams and South East Water will look to adopt applicable ideas, supporting the development of digital tools prototyped during the event.

This exciting 2-day contest is taking place as part of a broader innovation programme with multiple future challenges. 

The event is open to national and international participants, but will also showcase the digital talent and data analytics skills and capacity in South East Water and also provide an opportunity for regional expertise to meet and engage with like-minded professionals and scale commercial organisations.

If you are interested in participating, simply ENTER HERE

If you have any questions please contact Peter Chalder-Wood (peter@addstrategy.co.uk)

The initiative is sponsored by South East Water, with the event running across two days from the 29th-30th October.  The event will be led by the Innovation team at South East Water and supported by +ADD Strategy, our innovation partner, along with a number of postgraduate researchers with an interest in big data, data analytics and data exploration and expression.

Aspects of the data will be closed and others open. Closed data will be accessible in-person and data will only be released onsite.

The event will be hosted at the Regus Admiral Park building in Dartford, Kent. 

Participants will be invited to attend and work in a secure way on the data. 

• Practicality in application (0-20)
  How useful is the analysis model in its intended real world situation for leakage prioritisation?
• Completion of evidence solution (0-20)
  How complete or polished is the analysis model or tool? 
• Novelty (0-20)
  How unique and innovative is the solution prototype in application? 
• Data expression and usability (0-20)
  How well-designed is the solution prototype, paying attention to user experience and user interface?