Anglian Water is flagging up a future supply chain opportunity for Optimisation of Water Services – the water company is inviting suppliers to submit Expressions of Interest to participate in a market research study.

Anglian Water has issued a Periodic Indicative Notice (PIN) outlining the upcoming procurement opportunity to work with the company on the optimisation of water services, including smart water systems. The market research is looking to identify the complementary systems available to meet the ever-increasing challenges all water utilities are now facing to drive operational efficiency, enhance system wide operations and improve risk management, while aiming for frontier performance in strategic outcomes from source to tap.

Anglian states in the PIN that it currently operates a large interconnected water supply system, set across a broad and diverse geographical region, with systems that often have complex operations based upon multiple and changing parameters. Further adding to this complexity is a new Strategic Pipeline spanning the length of Anglian Water’s network, increasing the ability to proactively manage water resources and improve resilience, which is currently under construction. The utility says this creates further complexity across the water system which requires additional capability enabling Anglian Water to adopt a more holistic approach.

The water company operates an existing SCADA network (Out of Scope) with significant levels of automation.

Anglian Water says it will need to further develop its current control philosophies to move to a planned production environment (Production Planning), through the implementation of more advanced software systems within its OT and IT Architecture.

The water company says this will provide it with the ability to operate the water system proactively and enable autonomous control, or to respond to meet the changing requirements and challenges placed upon a smart water system.

The sorts of decisions would include the management and optimisation of:

• Abstraction licence control (Water resourcing)
• Production and distribution costs
• Energy efficiency
• Renewable energy sources
• Asset conditioning
• Water quality
• Supply demand balance (Current)
• Supply demand balance (Forecast)
• Maintenance planning (To enable production planning)
• Water storage points
• Incident management (Appropriate response to unplanned water system events)
• Manual scenario planning

Anglian says there is also consideration in the ability to utilise these solutions to manually assess scenarios to inform planning activities and future investments.

Estimated date of publication of a formal contract notice is October 2024. In the meantime, Anglian is inviting interested suppliers to submit Expressions of Interest by 5 January 2024 – click here to access the Periodic Indicative Notice documentation.