Rehabilitation Priority Determination of Water Pipes Based on Hydraulic Importance

Abstract

This paper describes a study conducted to develop a method to facilitate more reliable determination of the rehabilitation priority order for water pipes by taking into account the pipes' hydraulic importance. Existing methods use only the pipeline deterioration rate to determine the rehabilitation priority order. Accordingly, the deterioration rate under normal conditions and the hydraulic importance under abnormal conditions of water distribution pipelines were classified according to two different attributes. The deterioration rate of a water distribution pipeline was calculated in terms of the deterioration rate due to pipeline information factors and the deterioration rate resulting from the installation environment/external factors. The hydraulic importance of water distribution pipelines was calculated by considering the importance of a single pipe failure caused by water leakage or an accident and that of a multiple pipe failure caused by a disaster, such as an earthquake. These four attribute factors were employed in a multi-criteria decision-making process called a weighted utopian approach, developed in this study, that determines the final rehabilitation priority order for each pipeline. The study results indicate that the rehabilitation priority order can be OPEN ACCESSWater 2014, 6 3865 determined more easily using this approach than with previously-developed methods and that the model developed is easier and more convenient to apply than existing rehabilitation priority order models that require a large amount of data, as well as complex failure probabilities and mathematical models.

Comparison of Multi-Criteria Decision Support Methods for Integrated Rehabilitation Prioritization

“…State of-the-art projects in rehabilitation management for urban water networks [5][6][7] focus mainly on one single network alone while an integrated multi-utility approach is still seldom used [8,9]. Instead of examining all public networks separately, this paper presents an approach for a combined rehabilitation planning of different infrastructure networks.…”

Choosing a Water Distribution Pipe Rehabilitation Solution Using the Analytical Network Process Method

“…At the international level, the methods of choosing technical solutions for the rehabilitation of water distribution networks are focused on the following main areas: predictive models on pipe degradation [17,18], models for risk estimation [19], economic and financial analysis [20], social analysis [21], cost optimization [22], energy optimization [23,24], the analysis of CO 2 emissions on life cycle (LCE/LCA) [25], and multi-criteria methods [26].…”

“…For easier calculations in the case of multi-criteria methods, in practice it is customary to use software programs. Weighted Utopian Approach [17] Weistroffer et al [47] inventoried a number of 79 MCA software packages implementing a variety of MCA methods [31,47].…”

Model Performance Indicator of Aging Pipes in a Domestic Water Supply Distribution Network

“…The unaccountable water can be divided into two components; 1) unbilled authorised consumption that might be due to water theft and metering faults and 2) water losses from leakage or bursts at pipelines [5]. Over time, the pipelines deteriorate, due to internal and external factors such as pipe age, pipe material, pipe size, soil type, pipe location, and water quality [6,7]. Aging pipelines have caused frequent pipe leakage and burst events [8], and consequently affect the quality and the quantity of water received by the consumers.…”