The potential of deterioration modelling to support sewer asset management

Several infrastructure studies highlight the ongoing deterioration of critical assets in water and wastewater systems (WERF, 2007). A recent survey among 397 water and wastewater industry participants in the U.S.A. and Canada highlights that aging infrastructure and the management of capital and operational costs are the two main industry issues (Black and Veatch, 2013). From the participants, more than 70% of municipalities and utilities have already implemented condition assessment and inspection programs to assess the condition state of their systems. However, less than 10% are currently using simulation tools to support their asset management strategies. These results underline the strong opportunity for municipalities and utilities to increase the efficiency of their asset management programs by extracting the value of their (already) available data. Several modeling approaches are now available but not commonly used by sewer operators to support strategies (Caradot et al., 2013). Indeed, most of these models still fail to show that they can adequately forecast future conditions (Ana and Bauwens, 2010; Scheidegger et al., 2011). This article presents an assessment of the ability of sewer deterioration models to simulate the condition distribution of sewer networks. The analysis has been done using the extensive CCTV dataset of a German city, Braunschweig.

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