CIO Bulletin

Aquasight LLC - Real-Time Digital AI Infrastructure Across the Entire Life Cycle of Water

Urbanization is one of the most significant trends of the 21st century, affecting global economic development, energy consumption, natural resource use, and human well-being. Urban growth is increasing the demand for freshwater resources. Yet, surprisingly the water sources of the world’s large cities have never been globally assessed, hampering efforts to evaluate the distribution and causes of urban water stress.

Aquasight, through technology and AI, is enabling smart utility and operation of infrastructure for the entire water cycle. Their solutions are empowering the workforce in five specific areas: driving O&M efficiency, enabling asset intelligence (even those that are 50-year-old assets), managing risks and blind spots, retaining operational and institutional knowledge, and planning efficient capital allocation. The company does so by tapping into a voluminous amount of real-time and non-real-time generated across the life cycle of water daily and processing it through an Aquasight AI engine where insights, advice, and intelligence are generated in real-time. These insights are made available through a portfolio of six Aquasight apps or an API that utilities can consume.

Aquasight’s Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure

Aquasight invested and built the industry’s first Real-Time AI infrastructure dedicated to water cycle. It composes of four key components. First, a data ingestion that can consume data from many proprietary and third-party source systems existing in utilities, SCADA, GIS, LIMS, CMMS, Weather, Models, etc. Second, a data management that partitions and stores this high volume and high-velocity data so it can be staged for processing as well retrieval. This layer many times also checks the quality of data incoming.

The third layer Aquasight AI processing engine leverages water expertise and modeling expertise to create 2x to 5x more information than what is consumed. The fourth layer is front-end apps that are used by various personnel in the utility workforce. There is a portfolio of six apps Aquasight has created to complete this infrastructure, ATLAS – Pump Health & Operations, AURA – Smart Water Distribution Network, ACE – Smart Sewer Intelligence, APOLLO – Efficient Wastewater Treatment, AMP – Asset Management & Capital Planning, CEWS – Infectious Disease Sewage Surveillance. Aquasight digital infrastructure complements physical water infrastructure owned and operated by Cities, Villages, and Townships. It makes them better, including the quality of water that it treats, manages and distributes, and collects.

ACE is Turning on Lights in our Sewer Systems

It used to take weeks and months to download, scrub, visualize, troubleshoot and analyze sewer collection system data. Now with the advent of innovative technology, it takes few clicks and few seconds. ACE is a collection system intelligence platform with built-in AI capabilities. It can consume and merge real-time or historical data from any sensor manufacturer and pump station. ACE can save significant costs today in collection system data management & analytics. It is designed for engineers to map and reduce Inflow & Infiltration and for the operations team working on sewer clean-ups & maintenance. Built-in anomaly detection will pick up things that the human eye cannot and will send notifications. Analytics & Reporting can be done on the fly, and a real-time dashboard provides visibility on areas that are reaching max capacity. ACE creates a legacy for the next generation of utility operators.

AURA is Putting an end to Bacteria Regrowth

AURA is a groundbreaking GIS map-based technology that helps optimize water quality in the distribution system, connects smart water meters to detect water loss and resident leaks, helps detect pressure drops in the water pipes, and creates virtual simulated views of the age of water in the pipes. Most utilities do not pay attention to water quality data unless it is a compliance issue or uses water meter data other than for billing. AURA repurposes this data to predict where issues are likely to occur and help identify areas where they should put in place a flushing program. AURA is a pre-built smart system that utilities can plug and play. It also integrates very efficiently to various data sources to provide operators an integrated view of many issues and challenges in the drinking water distribution system. Using Aura, cities can avoid blind spots that endanger public health, leaks that create losses or resident anger, and pressure drops that might cause system-wide issues.

APOLLO is Enabing an- Efficient Wastewater Treatment and Resource Recovery Facility

APOLLO is a state-of-the-art technology that provides real-time performance insights into treatment process conditions and delivers actionable advice on opportunities for efficiency gains without impacting water quality or the environment. This platform creates smart operators and smart operations and captures the knowledge of the retiring workforce, and derisk a community. This platform is known to create between 10% to 40% in savings in consumables and several other benefits such as training efficiency, capital investment planning, predictive maintenance, to name a few. Wastewater infrastructure is critical for healthy communities and vibrant watersheds. Since the operations team are always on the move, it is important that they manage by exception but also have at their fingertips intelligence and advice on how things are going. Apollo acts as a digital buddy to the wastewater treatment team. Aquasight’s APOLLO was developed as part of a joint effort with the Department of Energy program. It was deployed at one of the largest plants in the country and later scaled to smaller plants.

The Goal of 21st Century Water Podcast

The 21st Century Water is a free knowledge-sharing podcast series featuring insightful discussions and solutions on the most pressing issues facing America’s 50,000+ utilities. The monthly podcast will feature water leaders who are working to meet both existing and emerging challenges and dive deep into novel solutions and new models that produce tangible results. This podcast aims to increase the likelihood that success stories can be replicated by leaders, operators, and executives across the country. The podcast is also designed to motivate and create vibrant 21st-century water systems and the innovative workforce required to lead and operate them. Until now, nine episodes have been released to date and have seen great success.

About the CEO

Mahesh Lunani is the Founder and CEO of Aquasight - A real-time Artificial Intelligence and Technology Company for the life cycle of water. The technology has been deployed across 100+ sites in various cities, counties, and townships and is recognized by utility leaders, state agencies, and elected officials. Mahesh left the corporate world to pursue a passion for solving big challenges in mature industries with innovative and disruptive digital businesses. Prior to starting his own business, Mahesh was a seasoned business leader with 20 years of experience in the industry, consulting, and venture capital. Mahesh has incubated and build next-generation products and businesses at Cognizant, a NASDAQ-listed company. In addition, he has experience working in many industries and several countries outside the US, such as UK, Germany, Korea, China, Japan, and Mexico.