When is innovation really innovative?

Cardiff Council has been supported by Y Lab's Digital Innovation Accelerator to trial sensor technologies across the city’s water drainage system to enable strategic planning with the aim of reducing flood risks.

Water goes where it wants to, following the path of least resistance on its way to sea level. So managing the myriad of water courses in a thriving city like Cardiff is a significant effort and it's one that requires constant vigilance, especially in a country that pours Welsh sunshine!

The big question is: how do we become more reactive in understanding the impact of micro-weather events on specific points in our infrastructure? And the obvious answer is: to have more information about the impact of weather via good models and real-time data from sensors.

We started our project thinking about putting sensors into one or two culverts with known issues. These would measure water height and flow at specific points identifying if the culvert is blocked or being overwhelmed. Then we could become more proactive in managing these culverts.

This approach seemed like a simple solution to becoming more proactive, but it had a sustainability problem. The commercially available sensors are too expensive to enable installation on every culvert. Also, culverts are only one part of our water management infrastructure and the whole interrelated water system of rivers, drains, culverts and gulleys needs to be monitored if we are to ever truly model the hydrology of Cardiff.

This understanding moved our problem from being one about monitoring culverts to one of how to sustainably monitor water features around Cardiff and the wider South Wales water systems. With different water assets owned and managed by different entities creating an interconnected network of sensors, it would always be difficult to establish and manage. The answer had to be an open data approach allied with lower cost open hardware sensors. This pivoting of the project to tackle the problem of affordable sensors came out of the Digital Innovation Accelerator workshop run by Y Lab.

The project is now researching all of the citizen based work that is going on as part of the growth of the Internet of Things. Cheap hardware and connectivity aligned to open data platforms, with interesting projects such as the flood.network and Things Network.

So we're off researching and connecting with wider networks, exactly the sort of innovative thinking and problem solving that Y Lab was established to perform. When we've finished our research we will look at how best to foster a community led and open approach to sensing and water management. The start of a journey towards the city as a platform.

Image copyright Gareth James and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licencing

Author

Ross Maude

Ross is the Chief Enterprise Architect for the City of Cardiff Council, tasked with enabling business change underpinned by innovative technologies.