Serge SASSUS Regional Director, Daniel BARY Director of the Garonne and Tributaries Area, Jérôme NATTA Director of Operations South-West Region representatives of VEOLIA WATER FRANCE and Narendra JUSSIEN, Director of IMT Mines Albi signed today a collaboration agreement for the realization of the RE-S-EAU Resilience and Efficiency of WATER Production and Distribution Systems project.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AT THE SERVICE OF WATER NETWORK MANAGEMENT

 

 

Named RE-S-EAU, for Resilience and Efficiency and EAU (meaning water in French) Production and Distribution Systems, the joint laboratory, created today by IMT Mines Albi and Veolia, is further proof of the added value of the approach developed by the school's Centre Génie Industriel. The latter combines methods derived from industrial engineering and artificial intelligence to develop intelligent systems for crisis management and logistics networks. This expertise will feed into the design of new decision-making tools that will enable Veolia to improve the operational and environmental performance of its water production and distribution networks.

TOWARDS INTELLIGENT MANAGEMENT OF WATER AND WASTEWATER NETWORKS

Within the framework of the RE-S-EAU joint laboratory, Veolia intends to draw on the multidisciplinary expertise of the Centre Génie Industriel (CGI) of IMT Mines Albi to develop decision-support tools enabling it to increase the operational and environmental performance of the water networks it manages.

Three areas of research will be explored:

• Predictive maintenance: based on provisional (statistics-based) or predictive (based on artificial intelligence algorithms) approaches, this part of the program aims to anticipate the maintenance needs of the system so as to ensure its maximum robustness.
• The planning of maintenance operations for drinking water production and wastewater treatment facilities, with the combined objective of optimizing the use of resources and the efficiency of the service provided.
• Management of crisis situations via immersive solutions: these will be based in particular on virtual reality, cockpit and decision-making control tower technologies. The objective is to develop a decision-making system that will improve the resilience of the water production and distribution network in the face of disruptions. This system could be used for training purposes or to define and monitor a response plan in the event of a real crisis.

CGI'S ORIGINAL APPROACH, A SOURCE OF INNOVATION

The originality of the approach of the Centre Génie Industriel of IMT Mines Albi is to have positioned its research at the frontier of industrial engineering and artificial intelligence, and then to have transposed this work to other fields of applications. It has thus built a unique approach that allows the design of intelligent decision-making systems, imbued with business knowledge and enriched with immersive technologies to promote better human readability of the results provided by AI.

"The creation of this joint laboratory with Veolia will enable the IMT Mines Albi Centre Génie Industriel to explore a new field of application and to feed the innovation approach of this major player in the water and drainage market", Narendra Jussien, Director of IMT Mines Albi.