Drainage Services Department

Research Paper on Predictive Maintenance of Sewage Treatment Plant Won International Award

A research paper entitled "META: Deep Learning Pipeline for Detecting Anomalies on Multimodal Vibration Sewage Treatment Plant Data" won the Best Paper Award at the 16th International Conference on Neural Computation Theory and Applications, held in Portugal on 22 November 2024.

The winning paper introduces META (Multi-modal feature Extraction and Transformer-based Autoencoder), an innovative artificial intelligence system that enables efficient predictive maintenance by monitoring sewage pump conditions at Stonecutters Island Sewage Treatment Works. Field testing has proven META can provide effective data for detecting potential equipment issues, demonstrating outstanding performance.

Photo of the Drainage Services Department research team, Ms. Sussana LAI Wai-kwan, Ag Assistant Director/Electrical & Mechanical (second left), Mr. CHAN Yiu-hon, Former Assistant Director/Electrical & Mechanical (third left), Mr. Raymond TONG Yuen-fung, Ag Chief Engineer/Electrical & Mechanical Projects (first left), Mr. Heiton HO Man-hoi, Senior Engineer (first right) and Ms. Jolly CHAN Pui-ching, Electrical & Mechanical Engineer (second right)

Photo of the winning team members at the Stonecutters Island Sewage Treatment Works Main Pumping Station.

The research is the result of a collaboration between the Drainage Services Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and XTRA Sensing Limited.