This event offers independents and teams the opportunity to engage in solving a major challenge facing the water industry. 20% of all water produced is lost in leakage!

We have a vast amount of operational and process data. Can you help explore and combine information from different sources to discover new insights?

We’re bringing together a community of data analysts, visualisers, business intelligence practitioners and software developers to gain different perspectives.  Participants are welcome from the UK and overseas.  There are also sponsored team places available.

The Hackathon will see teams form and compete. The objective to produce the most impactful data insights, expression, mashup or visualization.  This is a great opportunity to identify potential projects and demonstrate your capabilities.

Our goal is to discover analytics that can:

• Establish novel insight from data that enables better, more accurate definition of leakage (versus unbilled and unmeasured consumption)
• Offer new asset intelligence, helping us to better identify or predict leak risk and make better decisions on priorities for repair and replacement. (Our focus is main infrastructure such as ‘trunk mains’ and secondary distribution.
• Support teams in our Leakage innovation sprint (an event running alongside the Hackathon, focusing on hardware systems and sensor solutions).

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

This exciting 2-day contest will run alongside a broader innovation sprint, attracting organisations with relevant innovations, systems and hardware from the water industry, its supply chain and beyond. This provides the opportunity for you to explore data and build insight supporting new specialist companies.

The event will showcase the digital talent and data analytics skills and capacity in Coventry and Warwickshire and also provide an opportunity for regional expertise to meet and engage with like-minded professionals and scale commercial organisations.

Why participate?

Engage with one of the largest organisations in the UK - Severn Trent have a revenue of over £1.8billion.  The organisation invest heavily in regional skills, expertise and innovation. We are actively seeking enterprising organisations that can help us resolve complex problems.

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 - Measuring leakage and predicting asset failure 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 opportunity

Severn Trent are a responsible business that respects the environment and the communities where we work. We want to make a positive difference. The water industry is under intense pressure to reduce costs and improve services.
 
Our goal is to focus on improving baseline measurement of leakage and to explore means to enhance the definition of leakage in consideration of un-accounted for consumption.

Further we want to facilitate better prediction of issues, and improve decision making on priority for maintenance / replacement of trunk-main and secondary distribution assets.  The results could save time, money and effort as well as reducing disruption to service and to daily lives.

We want you to help us define and demonstrate the potential savings that could be made through new ways of integrating and analysing data.

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. Leakage is an area the water industry takes seriously and research funding is available through UKWIR and other initiatives.

Principal challenges:

To create and demonstrate (via a pilot demonstrator and visualisation), practical application of novel analytics and or intelligence solutions; and to consider how these could be extensions to accuracy in leakage definition and modelling OR trunk-main and secondary asset intelligence in the context of minimising leakage.

Specifically delivering one or more of the following:

1. Support enhanced or more accurate leakage definition / modelling
2. Establish extensions to existing asset intelligence for decision making
3. Collaborate and work with novel system and hardware ideas / developments being established in the adjacent innovation design sprint.

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 Severn Trent, with the main event running across two days from the 29th-30th November.  The event will be led by the Innovation team at Severn Trent 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 will be accessible in-person and data will only be released onsite.

The event will be hosted at the Coventry University Technology Park, Puma Way, Coventry, CV1 2TT and will support distributed work and support from a wider community including Microsoft. Participants will be invited to join the space and work in a secure way on the data.

Further Severn Trent Water systems and BI specialists will be on hand during the data hack to assist with questions arising during the experiment.

On signing up and undertaking confidentiality terms, a document outlining the detailed challenge and the rules of the competition in more detail will be released.

A few sponsored places:

In recognition of the opportunity cost of participating for 2 days, Severn Trent are providing a contribution of £500 for 6 sponsored places (each).  Please indicate your interest in securing this funding in the application form.

Prizes and Judging:

• First prize: £500
• Second prize: £250
• Judges and criteria will be announced on DEVPOST.

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