Performance assessment for water networks

Water networks (WNs) are responsible of providing adequate amounts of safe water to the public. As other critical infrastructure systems, water networks are subjected to deterioration which increases the number of breaks and leaks and lower water quality. Given, aging infrastructure and tight budgets, there is a rapidly increasing need for efficient rehabilitation programs to maintain the sustainable and cost-effective functionality of WNs. The first step towards developing such planning programs is to assess the performance of water assets. This paper introduces a novel model for assessing the performance of water networks. Water network consists of several pipeline segments. Water pipelines are clustered into homogenous groups based on their characteristics. Weibull Probability Distributions are then utilized to model the time between failures, censored data, and thus estimate the reliability as well as the deterioration of these pipes. Subsequently, the criticality of water pipelines is elicited to serve as a prioritizing tool that asserts more weight of importance on the pipes of significant social, environmental and economic consequence of failure. Multi Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) is adopted to calculate the performance of each segment. The evaluating of WN performance that can be derived using this approach will assist utility managers to accurately construct comprehensive maintenance and rehabilitation programs for the components, segments and entire.