Our Chief Creative Officer, Dr. Douglas Leith, recently spoke at the European Wastewater Management Conference & Exhibition about the application of AI for spotting leading indicators of environmental incidents.

 

In his 15-minute presentation, Dr. Leith highlighted COMET's approach to root cause analysis and incident investigation, focusing on the power of AI to anticipate and prevent future incidents.

‍Key Highlights:

  • Eliminating Repeat Failures: By combining software and services, COMET enables users to look at past risks, particularly to analyse and investigate any previous incidents, whether environmental, cyber, or health and safety related. This enables the identification of root causes and the implementation of preventive     actions. Additionally, COMET offers an incident management module to help organisations optimise their processes and effectively manage current risks. These solutions help various industries, especially the water sector in the UK, to learn from past mistakes and avoid repeating them.
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) to turn data into intelligence: Moving beyond current risk assessments. By analysing unstructured data and transforming it into structured insights, COMET helps organisations identify patterns and potential issues before they escalate.
  • Comprehensive Root Cause Analysis: COMET is an acronym. It covers five different types of root causes—Communications (C), Operating Environment (O), Management (M), Equipment Failure (E), and Training (T) — each essential for understating the root causes of incidents. Dr. Leith explains how the software helps to identify these factors in incidents, providing a detailed understanding of underlying issues. Learn more about COMET's Incident Investigation Module.‍
  • Focus on Human Factors: Many incidents involve human behaviour and actions. COMET's model incorporates these elements to offer a more comprehensive view of root causes, helping organisations address technical and human-related factors.
  • Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts: COMET enables users to analyse historical data and monitor real-time information, setting up alerts for trends and changes. This dynamic capability allows organisations to stay ahead of potential risks.
  • Collaboration and Data Quality: Dr. Leith emphasises the importance of high-quality data to maximise the benefits which can be derived from using AI, in his own words, low data volume, low quality data, is the same as “Rubbish in, rubbish out”. High-quality data directly translates to better insights for refining decision-making on interventions and investments.


Making better decisions with better data‍

In sectors such as water supply and wastewater management, organisations gather vast amounts of data from multiple sources—including customer reports, internal observations, and detailed incident records. This data represents a valuable resource for informing strategic decisions and managing risks effectively. Learn more about COMET for Wastewater Management and Utilities.
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With the output from COMET's AI Data Analytics module, those organisations can make better decisions on multiple fronts:

• Decide on the most appropriate interventions, such as training for maintenance crews or improvements to operating procedures.

• Decide on best targeted investment spend, for example spending capex on improvements to cellar layouts thus preventing future risk rather than on dealing with the aftermath of floods.

• Decide on optimised resource allocation, for example deploying people on tasks which make a difference to reducing future risk.

• Decide on pre-emptive actions, for example tackling latent factors which are increasing over time and likely to become future incident root causes.

• Decide on improvements to data gathering, for example structuring the way in which in incident data is recorded in a common taxonomy.


Watch the full video to explore how the wastewater industry can harness AI to analyse thousands of records, extract unseen patterns, suggest improvements, and enable professionals to be more proactive.

Get in touch to learn more about how COMET provides smarter, data-driven solutions in incident management and prevention.

‍Connect with Dr. Douglas Leith on LinkedIn by clicking here.

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