Optimal Intervention Planning: A Bottom-Up Approach to Renewing Aging Water Infrastructure

Abstract

Water distribution is an essential service provided in cities. To ensure that the public has access to high quality drinking water in sufficient quantity at all times, intervention programs must be determined to replace deteriorated objects in the network. These intervention programs have costs, cause temporary service interruptions, and impact traffic. Optimal intervention programs must be developed and the financial requirements of these programs must be communicated and justified to stakeholders. This is a difficult task at the scale of modern cities due to the extent of large water distribution networks, the variety of objects that must be considered, the number of constraints (i.e., financial and operational) that must be respected, the high level of uncertainty surrounding relevant data, and the reliance on nonformalized expert knowledge of utility workers for decision-making. In this paper, a novel methodology for determining intervention programs for an example water distribution network is presented. The approach is best suited to short-term intervention planning, is based on the existing network structure and components, and is reliant on the intervention strategies defined by the water utility. The methodology allows infrastructure managers to incorporate the expert knowledge of utility workers into the decision-making process, estimate the costs and benefits of executing preventive interventions on all objects (i.e., pipes and objects housed in facilities), and consider budget constraints. Intervention programs for a 5-year planning period for different budget scenarios are shown.