Risk-based approach to manage aging urban water main infrastructure

Abstract

The growing number of challenges in how to manage aging infrastructures, while maintaining a suitable level of service, have become major problems for many municipal water utility companies.As a result, municipalities are increasingly considering the concept of risk assessment and prioritization as the first and an important step that has to be used towards effective assetmanagement practices. Most experts agree that the main effort has to focus on implementing riskbased asset-management practices meeting a degree of sustainability decision-making process.However, there are so many challenges to establish common practices and understand the ground for operational implementations of the concept of the risk. This paper aims to form a basic decision support model to address urgent needs of risk-based water main asset-management tools.Furthermore, efforts have been made to demonstrate how this model can be used to support decision-makers to reach sound decisions for prioritization of mitigation with more informed and sound collective judgments of peer experts. This includes addressing the existing or potential risks based on scenarios, likelihood, consequences of the outcomes, and results of the action. In conclusion, this model would benefit decision-makers in evaluating further different planning horizons and set priorities for replacement or rehabilitation maintenance programs.

Risk‐based Decision Making Definition: A Scoping Review of Food, Agricultural, Environmental, and Medical Literature

“…The second theme found in the literature is that RBDM is about priority setting; that is, about comparing one risk or one risk management intervention to another. In these cases, decisions are based on allocation of limited resources such as remediation funds for leaking underground storage tanks (Connor & McHugh, 2002 ), resources to manage aging urban water infrastructure (Mamo, 2015 ), or time in the operating room (Abbasgholizadeh Rahimi, Jamshidi, Ait‐Kadi, & Bartolome, 2016 ). This theme could be considered a subset of risk acceptability in that is forces the consideration of at least one factor in addition to risk—one related to resources.…”

“…( 2011 ) 2011 Medical Risk Acceptability and Stakeholder Engagement Li et al. ( 2014 ) 2014 Engineering and Infrastructure Risk Acceptability Lipton and Gillett ( 1992 ) 1992 Environmental science Risk Acceptability Mamo ( 2015 ) 2015 Engineering and Infrastructure Prioritization Manap and Voulvoulis ( 2014 ) 2014 Ecological Risk Acceptability McCloskey, B., Zumla, A., Lim, P. L., Endericks, T., Arbon, P, Cicero, A., & Borodina, M. (2020). A risk‐based approach is best for decision making on holding mass gathering events.…”

Towards a virtual water currency for industrial products using blockchain technology

“…This aims to transform water management processes to achieve economic efficiency, social equity and environmental sustainability. Mamo (2015) presented a basic decision support model for the prioritization of mitigation with betterinformed and collective judgements. Wicaksono et al (2017) argued for the development of a decision support system that will simulate and quantify water, energy and food interactions.…”

Neural Network Approach for Availability Indicator Prediction

“…Therefore the risk of damage and other adverse factors which lower the operational reliability of the system should be properly assessed and reduced to an acceptable level by means of the available mathematical methods, e.g. Bayesian model [12] or methods of good management [13,14]. This means that the failure frequency of the particular water supply network components (pumping stations, clean water reservoirs, fittings and water conduits) should be thoroughly analyzed.…”