LeakPriority: Prioritizing Water Leak Repairs by Impact
The Problem
Water leakage can lead to avoidable water wastage, infrastructure damage, and inefficient maintenance operations. When several leaks are reported at once, maintenance teams need a practical way to decide which ones require attention first.
Treating every complaint equally can make prioritization difficult. LeakPriority explores a more transparent, impact-driven approach to water leak management.
Our Solution
LeakPriority is a web-based decision-support prototype designed for municipal water departments, utility teams, and housing society maintenance teams.
It uses an explainable priority-scoring approach to rank reported leaks based on factors such as:
- Number of affected households
- Time the leak has remained unresolved
- Proximity to critical facilities
The objective is to help users understand not only which leak should receive attention first, but also why it has been assigned that priority.
How It Works
- Report: Add a water leak report with the relevant details.
- Evaluate: The application processes the available information using its priority-scoring logic.
- Prioritize: Reports are ranked to help users identify urgent cases.
- Track: Repair progress and status changes can be managed through the application.
- Estimate impact: Water-loss estimates can help illustrate the potential benefits of timely repairs, subject to the assumptions used.
Technology Stack
- Programming language: JavaScript
- Current report storage: Browser localStorage
- Planned cloud architecture: AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB
Planned AWS Architecture
The intended cloud architecture separates the user interface, application logic, and data storage:
React frontend → Amazon API Gateway → AWS Lambda → Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon API Gateway is intended to expose backend API endpoints.
- AWS Lambda is intended to validate requests and process application logic.
- Amazon DynamoDB is intended to store leak reports and repair statuses persistently.
Current status: The AWS backend has not yet been deployed or verified. The current frontend uses browser localStorage, so the architecture above describes the planned cloud integration rather than a live AWS connection.
Why Explainable Prioritization?
A priority score is most useful when users can understand the factors behind it. An explainable approach can make maintenance decisions easier to review, communicate, and improve.
The scoring model is intended to support human decision-making rather than replace on-site inspection or professional engineering judgment.
Potential Impact
LeakPriority aims to support:
- More systematic repair prioritization
- Better visibility into unresolved leak reports
- Clearer communication of repair urgency
- More organized tracking of maintenance progress
- Estimation of potential water savings after repairs
Any calculated water savings should be treated as estimates unless supported by actual measurements.
Current Status and Future Work
LeakPriority is being developed as a hackathon prototype for the Heat and Water track of WeMakeDevs × AWS Environmental Hacks.
Future improvements include:
- Deploying and verifying the AWS serverless backend
- Connecting the frontend to the live API
- Implementing persistent cloud storage
- Adding authentication and authorization
- Improving input validation and operational reporting
- Refining water-loss estimates using measured data where available
Repository
Development Acknowledgement
AI coding assistance was used during development. The project should be evaluated according to the features that have actually been implemented and tested.
LeakPriority is a prototype intended to explore transparent, impact-based water leak prioritization. It is not an official municipal monitoring system, and estimated savings are not a substitute for measured results.
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