The city council of Barcelona, through its public company BCASA, is deploying an intelligent system for the sewerage network analysis of the city. The project, developed by BGEO in open source permits the automatic collection of datas and decisions making related to the maintenance and cleaning of the entire network.
How often Barcelona sewerage network must been clean? Which are the most critical points? Where should been prioritize investments in maintenance? How far can be optimize the public resources for sewerage management?
To answer those questions, the City Council of Barcelona incorporated in 2015 in its public tender contest of sewerage network the necessity to develop a technological tool that will permit to know automatically and with accuracy the network status. In this way, Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (FCC), the company in charge of the service, under the supervision of BCASA assigned to BGEO the project and its first stage is already a reality.
The system receives through a web service hundreds of daily datas collected by FCC technicians about network status and sediments deposited in the sewerage network. Once BCASA receives datas, this information is processed through algorythms developed by BGEO and the personal of the Polytechnic University of Catalunia (UPC) and it uses the result to prioritize cleanings and network maintenance works to coordinate inspections.
The project will acquire more relevance once annual datas of network status will be accumulated and will start to be crossed with information related to climatology, incidences, citizens complaints or any other linked parameter. All those things will permit a better planning management and a public resources optimization.
In addition, it has to be underlined that it reprezents one of the first project launch in open source by BCASA.This bet has resulted in costs optimization, in a system totally adapted to serve Barcelona citizens needs through an absolute transparent way concerning management and collected datas.