Water supply infrastructure in the United States is one lifeline system that is in dire need of huge financial investments to counter pipeline deterioration while keeping up with increasing demands and reliability goals. With decreasing financial resources available to state and local governments, effective decision-making tools for pipeline prioritization are becoming an increasingly integral part of the water utility industry. A majority of existing prioritization frameworks are merely based on the likelihood of the failure of pipelines and the resulting consequences, with little consideration given to the utility's response time to a water pipeline failure. This paper presents a novel resilience-based framework for effective prioritization of water distribution pipelines. The novelty lies in estimating the utility's response time to a pipeline failure. The proposed framework is demonstrated on a section of a real water distribution network in a coastal city of the United States. The pipeline priority results obtained are also compared with those from a more traditional risk-based prioritization scheme, and a reasonably significant difference has been observed. While availability of quality data is a challenge, this study brings to attention the importance of response time to water pipeline failures and demonstrates the merits of incorporating it in a prioritization scheme.

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Transportation agencies are currently challenged to keep up with culvert infrastructure that is rapidly deteriorating due to lack of adequate maintenance and capital improvement. It is imperative for the transportation agencies to identify and rehabilitate deteriorated culverts prior to their failures. Among several concerns, lack of rational rehabilitation prioritization tools is foremost. Complicating this need further, current practices vary widely across the state departments of transportation (DOTs) which makes it difficult to develop a universal approach for prioritizing failing culverts. This paper presents and demonstrates a failure risk-based culvert prioritization approach that is compliant with the inspection procedures of the South Carolina DOT. The approach presented in this paper is specifically developed for reinforced concrete pipe (RCP) and corrugated metal pipe (CMP) materials because of their wide popularity. Outcomes from a survey of state DOTs informed the development of parametric weightings using the principles of analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Weightings developed for several critical inspection parameters are combined with the corresponding condition assessment scores to determine the failure criticality of culverts, which are subsequently combined with estimated failure consequences to determine failure risk estimates. The prioritization approach is demonstrated using the condition assessment scores of over 5200 culvert structures in South Carolina.

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