Townsville City Council (TCC) maintains approximately 1426 km of wastewater pipes of various sizes and ages. Inspection and condition assessment of this critical infrastructure is crucial for TCC to provide reasonable level of service as well as assisting in the planning and prioritising of capital works.
The inspections are necessary to identify rehabilitation programs before the asset reaches point of no repair and prioritise assets that need to be renewed. Currently, the inspections are performed manually using a camera and visually recording the defects, which is operator subjectivity and prone to human error. This is important as a biased entry can affect the service and structural grades of the asset.
In 2023, TCC embarked on a different journey towards a cloud platform that can automate condition assessment for wastewater pipes utilising CCTV footage as per WSA 2020.
TCC has engaged VAPAR to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted sewer main condition assessment for optimising decision-making process on rehabilitation of wastewater pipes. In the initial trial phase, TCC has uploaded 17.9km of wastewater main CCTV footages to train the software in defect identification and assessment and it has been observed that the software can achieve about 70% accuracy in defect detection, assessment and providing repair recommendations without human intervention.
The software has streamlined the process bringing together the Asset Owner and the contractor under a single interface to minimize data handling. However, human intervention is still required to validate and improve the defect analysis and repair recommendation. The next phase of this journey will involve training the software to achieve 90% accuracy and combining the sewer pipe assessment data onto the TCC maps via GIS integration.