Joint Research Activity: The Urban Drainage Metrology Toolbox (UDMT)

Partners involved

• INSA Lyon, France
• Deltares, The Netherlands

About the project

As part of the Co-UDlabs Joint Research Activities on “Smart sensing and monitoring in urban drainage”, a user tool package called the Urban Drainage Metrology Toolbox (UDMT) has been developed. It is a free web app developed with the aim to facilitate the application of best practices and methods in monitoring urban drainage systems. UDMT is free to use either online or to download, without any registration. In addition, the code for the app has been made available if users wish to adapt it for their own use or to integrate it into existing systems. 

Main findings

• The main purpose of the tool is to help disseminate improved practice in metrology: researchers and operators need to be aware of how to work more seriously and rationally with metrology, and the UDMT is a good teaching demo and incentive to do better.
• The impact of this work is the hope that practice will change if people are informed. Working to the UDMT guidelines requires more skills and professionalism compared to frequently observed practice, and exposure to the tool highlights to practitioners that they need to do more than what they did in the past. Monitoring in urban drainage is currently just a box to tick after the data has been collected, with the objective of providing a monthly report about self-monitoring just to comply with regulations, rather than providing good data. In fact, there are not enough people available to process the data, so it is clear that there is a need to invest in the development of new skills in metrology.
• The transfer of knowledge from researchers to professionals may not be simple: research is often considered too far from the practice of professionals, so even if researchers advertise the tool, it is not always easy for the professionals to use this technology, in part due to a lack of trust and to a lack of incentives (in regulations, funding etc.). For this, an “early adopters” approach will be used: if we convince the few most advanced operators that this is the way forward, we hope that this community of advanced operators, who already have a proven history of trust within the professional group, can further disseminate this good practice amongst their colleagues.

Successful outcomes:

• The preparation for this project was relatively easy as 3 of the collaborators had already worked together, meaning that there was a level of trust already established, and the team could work with a high level of autonomy.  
• The Toolbox has been developed from previous knowledge and used some pre-existing MATLAB code, that was available in a metrology book (Metrology in urban drainage: plug and Pray (2021) DOI: 10.2166/979178906119) published by INSA and Deltares in 2021. The original aim was to make the code available with a relatively light task of polishing and annotating the code. However, to expand its use to much more people than those with a previous knowledge of MATLAB, it was decided to make it available as an autonomous tool with an easy-to-use interface, available with online/offline options.  
• Since its development, the toolbox has been used in MSc courses, training courses and webinars. Users find it interesting, as it is often their first experience of “real” best practice of metrology being applied to real data.  

Useful links:

• UDMT webapp: UDMT_2023b (ovh.net)