AQUAWIZE
LACROIX will achieve €708 million in sales by 2022, designing electronic equipment, IoT solutions, and AI for the automotive, industrial, connected home, aerospace, defense, and healthcare sectors. The group also optimizes critical infrastructures, including smart roads, water and energy networks.
Overview of the project
Thanks to a close collaboration with the city of Nevers and LACROIX, AQUAWIZE, a tool to assist and “augment” water operators, has been designed: an innovative solution focused on water network operators and based on their dreams and needs. AQUAWIZE minimizes the time needed to analyze all available data, and the analysis time. New technologies, such as AI, and new methods, such as machine learning using operator knowledge, were used to address this challenge and reduce analysis time by 96%. In this way, users can concentrate on making decisions concerning interventions, preventive maintenance and investments, while obtaining a detection of anomalies in the water network with a ranking of priorities. From this simple yet drastic improvement, many remarkable results have been achieved, such as savings in maintenance costs, reduced leakage and energy consumption. It has also led to greater recognition by city managers, and to more data-driven funding.
Nevers manages 630 km of water networks for 75,000 inhabitants.
AQUAWIZE is beginning to be deployed in other regions (Charente Maritime, Vallée de l’Hérault, etc.).
Aquawize is a tool, for water network managers, based on AI that dramatically accelerates the analysis of IoT data, aiding rapid decision-making and resulting in significant water and energy savings: from 25% to 50%.
Ongoing research
Project still in progress
Analysis time for water network anomalies reduced by 96%. :
– Rapid adoption by users (designed with and for water network operators): a few weeks
– 25% to 50% savings on water losses and energy savings (to produce drinking water)
– 100 MW saved by reducing unbilled water losses
– Detection of leaks that even experts could not “easily” detect
– The city of Nevers achieved a water network efficiency of over 90%.
– Approx. 30% savings on water maintenance
– ROI between 1 and 3 months
Some qualitative results:
– Detection of leaks that even experts could not “easily” detect
– Improved staff retention and loyalty
– Improved resilience of the water network with operator knowledge integrated into the tool
– Provide simple information for water network investment decisions
– Limit soil denaturation
– Every network problem is identified and quantified
– Repair, prevention and investment decisions are based on shared data
Funding via innovation contracts from the city of Nevers and via internal financing
organisation
LACROIX is a family-owned, listed company with sales of €708 million in 2022. It designs and manufactures electronic equipment for its customers’ products, as well as IoT (hardware, software & cloud) and AI solutions, notably for the automotive, industry, connected homes and buildings, aerospace and defense and healthcare sectors. The Group also supplies equipment and solutions for optimizing and securing critical infrastructures such as smart roads (public lighting, traffic management, V2X) and water and energy infrastructures.
Nevers agglomeration