Northumbrian Water has been awarded £1.6 million from the Ofwat Innovation Fund to develop an artificial intelligence system called Smart Alarm Management, or SAM, designed to help control room staff cut through the volume of alerts generated across the utility’s water and wastewater network. The award is part of a collaborative project led by Northumbrian Water with technology partner Softwire, alongside Anglian Water, the Engineering Equipment and Materials Users Association and Wessex Water. Northumbrian Water supplies water and sewerage services to 2.7 million customers across the region stretching from the Scottish borders to north Yorkshire, and manages that network around the clock from a central control centre that receives thousands of alarms a day. SAM will apply machine learning and data modelling to prioritise the alerts operators see first, flag likely root causes and suggest a course of action.
Why A £600m Innovation Fund Is Backing A Control-Room Tool
The grant comes from Ofwat, the economic regulator for water and wastewater services in England and Wales, which is running a £600 million, ten-year Water Innovation Fund intended to grow the sector’s capacity to innovate. Since 2020 the fund has supported well over 100 projects involving hundreds of partners, ranging from robotic pipe inspection to satellite-based river monitoring. The SAM award sits within that programme’s push toward practical, near-term AI deployments rather than purely experimental research, reflecting a broader shift in how the regulator is framing innovation spend for the 2025 to 2030 investment period known as AMP8.
What Smart Alarm Management Is Designed To Do
Every day, thousands of alarms fire across Northumbrian Water’s network, covering everything from pressure fluctuations to equipment faults, and control room staff must judge quickly which ones demand urgent action. SAM is intended to convert that raw alarm traffic into structured, prioritised insight, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to work out which alerts matter most and what is likely causing them. The system is being built directly with control room operators, an approach the partners say grounds the tool in how alarms are actually triaged on a live shift rather than in an abstract dataset.
A Proof Of Concept That Already Cut Alarm Volumes By Three Quarters
Before securing the Ofwat funding, Northumbrian Water and Softwire ran a proof of concept that reduced alarm volumes by 75 percent, a figure the partners are using as the baseline case for wider rollout. “Control rooms are the beating heart of our utility networks,” said Marcus Gardiner, Client Director for Energy and Utilities at Softwire, in the companies’ joint announcement of the award. That scale of reduction, if it holds up at full deployment, would represent a significant cut in the noise that currently competes for operator attention during a shift.
Vendor And Partner Roles Across The Consortium
Softwire is the technology delivery partner building the AI and data-modelling components of SAM in direct collaboration with Northumbrian Water’s control room teams. Anglian Water and Wessex Water are participating utilities, giving the project a route to test whether the tool generalises beyond a single company’s alarm architecture and control room practices. EEMUA, whose members include process and utility engineers who set industry guidance on alarm management, brings a standards perspective to how “good” alarm handling should look across the sector.
Part Of A Broader AI Push At Northumbrian Water
SAM is not an isolated initiative. Northumbrian Water has been expanding its use of artificial intelligence across operations, including a recent extension of its multi-year partnership with data specialist Aiimi covering water quality compliance and maintenance scheduling tools through AMP8, and a wider rollout of Vyntelligence’s AI video platform for asset condition monitoring across its northeast network. Taken together, the projects point to a company using multiple, separately funded AI tools to shift control room and field operations from reactive response toward earlier intervention.
Where SAM Fits Ofwat’s Emerging AI Agenda
Ofwat has separately signalled it wants AI to become a more structured part of how the sector operates, publishing plans to consult on AI guidance covering data readiness standards and a shared industry taxonomy. That plan explicitly cited Northumbrian Water’s satellite-and-AI river monitoring work and Anglian Water’s machine-learning network optimisation as examples of what the regulator’s Innovation Fund has already delivered. SAM adds a control-room operations use case to that list, at a moment when water companies face growing pressure to demonstrate resilience and responsiveness under AMP8 scrutiny.
