FlowState
How might we use data and expert knowledge paired with Artificial Intelligence to help water companies predict, prioritise, and reduce the impact of outage events.
FlowState is a collaborative sprint focused on strengthening incident response and operational resilience across the UK water sector. Outages within the water supply system have significant downstream impacts, many of which are currently difficult to quantify in real time. Including who is affected, the scale of customer impact, and how long disruption and recovery may last. As a result, water companies are required to make critical decisions under pressure without trusted or accessible data to assess outage impacts or to make informed risk-based decisions.
The consequences escalate quickly. Customers lose supply. Vulnerable households and priority sites are put at risk. Regulatory measures take a direct hit, particularly Interruptions to Supply (3+ hours) and Unplanned Outages. CMEX and CRI are then subsequently affected.
FlowState explores how changes across processes and technology could enable water companies to respond faster, make more consistent operational decisions, and improve visibility of outage impacts as incidents unfold. The goal is to identify practical opportunities that strengthen resilience, reduce customer impact, and support a more proactive and data-informed response capability.
FlowState will focus on:
- Incident response and operational resilience
- Supply interruption management
- Data integration and operational visibility
- Bringing data, model outputs and operational knowledge together into a single view for the people making the call
- Predictive analytics and optimisation
- Event management and decision support
- Mitigating and reducing customer impact and improving response times
Understand - Map the current incident response landscape to understand where the solution needs to sit and what it needs to cover. Identify pain points and hear directly from operational and industry experts
Diverge - Generate bold ideas and challenge traditional approaches to event and incident management.
Decide - Prioritise the most impactful concepts with the greatest operational and customer value.
Prototype - Rapidly build practical solution concepts, service models or operational approaches.
Test - Validate ideas with industry stakeholders, operational teams and experts to understand feasibility, impact and scalability.
By the end of the sprint, teams will have:
- A defined way of handling incidents end-to-end, so response no longer depends on who happens to be in the room
- A vision for a unified system - the Google of water operations. One place that pulls together data, predictive models and operational knowledge in real time during an incident
- A clearer picture of operational and network data - what's already there, what's underused, and where it could unlock faster, better decisions
- A set of opportunities for predictive and proactive management, looking at the specific places where getting ahead of an incident is realistic, valuable and worth investing in
- Create tested concepts that could reduce supply interruptions and improve resilience across the UK water sector
The long-term ambition of FlowState is simple: to help create a more proactive, resilient and intelligent water sector where incidents are reduced, response is faster and customers experience fewer disruptions to supply.
We are looking for people to join us with the following knowledge/experience;
- Water utility operators and incident teams
- Data and analytics specialists
- Asset and network managers
- Digital and innovation teams
- Business Continuity teams
- Technology partners and startups
- Customer and resilience specialists
- Anyone passionate about improving operational resilience in the water industry