Press Releases

March 15, 2023

Kurita Water Industries Ltd. (Head Office: Nakano-ku, Tokyo; President: Michiya Kadota; hereinafter "Kurita") and Fracta Leap Inc. (Head Office: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Yasuhiro Kitabayashi; hereinafter "Fracta Leap") are currently engaged in the development and deployment of automated design solutions for water treatment plants under their joint Meta-Aqua Project^*1,which aims to accelerate digital transformation (DX) in the water treatment industry.
In addition to the automated layout design application released last November, the project team has now released and deployed the beta version applications for equipment configuration and construction planning.

The Meta-Aqua Project aims to dramatically improve the speed of responding to customer proposals and drastically reduce the time required to design the projects in order to meet the needs of customers in the semiconductor industry as well as other industries, shortening the duration between the initial request from customer to the final plant startup.

In addition to these newly released applications the project team also aims to deliver a beta version application of block flow creation this summer, thereby covering all of the main processes involved in the basic plant design^*3 of water treatment plants, thus fully automating the process.

With this series of automated design applications, basic plant design workload is expected to be reduced by roughly 60%, with the design phase of projects being shortened by around 40%.

The features of the two new applications released are as follows.

• 1.An algorithm proposes multiple pattern combinations and order of the necessary water treatment equipment based on input information of water quality and volume.
• 2.Evaluation indicators such as initial costs and running costs, which are useful for comparing multiple patterns, are also displayed.
• 3.Enables simultaneous consideration of a wide range of patterns that was not available before.

• 1.An algorithm automatically generates construction work orders, assignment of workers, schedules, etc.
• 2.Visual representation of equipment installation, etc., in conjunction with generated schedules.
• 3.Enables consideration of multiple construction plans that end within the deadline, without use on excessive resources and scheduling requirements.

In line with the progress in the automated design application business, Fracta Leap is expanding its organizational structure and actively recruiting professionals such as architects/tech leads, mathematical optimization engineers, data engineers, product managers and business development leaders, with plans to hire around 30 to 40 full-time employees this year.