Updates from Preventos Informatics
Product notes, company updates, and practical writing on data-driven water and wastewater network management.
Stable tariffs are growth capital: the political economy of wastewater.
The series opened with combinatorics, walked through cost functions and Monte Carlo, hit the operational reality of external coordination, and stopped at the budget constraint. This final part is what all of it adds up to politically. The sewer network is capital...
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When the budget is cut: the cost of deferred renewal.
Parts 1 through 4 assumed an unconstrained search for the optimum. Real municipal asset management does not work that way. The investment ceiling is set by tariff politics, council priorities, and competing capital needs...
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Open the street once: external coordination and the 20–40 % prize.
Parts 1 through 3 treated the sewer network as a self-contained optimisation problem. It isn't. A defensible asset-management programme cannot ignore the fact that other actors — the municipal street programme...
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Error bars on the optimum: Monte Carlo and the risk profile.
Part 2 ended with the Pareto frontier as the structural answer to multi-objective optimisation. Part 3 takes the next step: the frontier itself is uncertain. Every input that feeds the cost function is a distribution...
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20 years, 30,000 pipes, 30,000 manholes — how many ways are there to maintain a sewer network?
Consider the wastewater network of a mid-sized Finnish city: roughly 30,000 pipe segments, a comparable number of manholes, and a 20-year planning horizon. The task sounds routine — decide what to rehabilitate, when...
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What does 'optimal' optimise? The cost function unpacked.
Part 1 established that the decision space for a sewer rehabilitation programme is unenumerable. The follow-up question is sharper: what are we optimising for? Any optimisation result is only as good as the objective...
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Why we rebuilt our wastewater data platform from scratch
Real-time monitoring and long-term infiltration & inflow analytics on the same screen — with the integration layer built into the product.
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The water utilities data problem is different than I thought
The development of Preventos' water management services most often begins with a customer-oriented approach. Discussions with the utility's network managers and engineers have given me a perspective on what is wanted...
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