Currently, water utilities are facing monetary crises to maintain and expand services to meet the current as well as the future demands. Standard practice in pipeline infrastructure asset management is to collect data and predict the condition of pipelines using models and tools. Water utilities want to be proactive in fixing or replacing the pipes as fixing-when-it-fails ideology leads to increased cost and can affect environmental quality and societal health. There is a number of modeling techniques available for assessing the condition of the pipelines, but there is a massive shortage of methods to check the reliability of the results obtained using different modeling techniques. It is mainly because of the limited data one utility collects and absence of piloting of these models at various water utilities. In general, water utilities feel confident about their in-house condition prediction and failure models but are willing to utilize a reliable methodology which can overcome the issues related to the validation of the results. This paper presents the methodology that can enhance the reliability of model results for water pipeline performance analysis which can be used to parallel the output of the real system with confidence. The proposed methodology was checked using the dataset of two large water utilities and was found that it can potentially help water utilities gain confidence in their analyses results by statistically signifying the results. / Master of Science

La thèse s’appuie sur un recueil de 48 productions narratives, orales puis écrites, recueillies auprès d’élèves scolarisés en classe de CM2, dans deux écoles de Metz et de Libreville. La consigne – identique dans les deux situations – a consisté à demander aux élèves qu’ils racontent une histoire qui leur était arrivée et qui les avait frappés. Nous cherchions, à partir de ce recueil empirique, à évaluer « qualitativement » la compétence narrative des élèves telle que plusieurs comparaisons nous aidaient à le faire (les deux productions d’un même élève, les productions écrites de la classe française, etc.). Après une première partie qui procède à différents cadrages – théoriques et méthodologiques – les analyses des productions recueillies sont envisagées du point de vue de la temporalité interne des procès (l’avancée, la simultanéité et la régression des faits rapportés) ainsi que le suggèrent les analyse de Bres (2001). Quant à l’évaluation de la cohésion des discours produits, nous nous sommes inspirée des études sur la cohérence et la cohésion (Adam, 2011 ; Charolles 1988) pour envisager les productions d’un point de vue d’abord global – le niveau supérieur de la narrativité – sur ce qu’elles semblent indiquer comme intention signifiante. Nous avons ensuite envisagé le niveau intermédiaire des plans de texte et de leur cohésion, c’est-à-dire de l’enchaînement des énoncés et des phénomènes de liaison (ou de rupture) qui, non strictement syntaxiques, qui fondent cette cohésion. Il s’est agi, tout au long de ce travail d’éviter une conception trop étroitement normative et micro-structurelle des erreurs rencontrées. À l’issue d’une deuxième partie consacrée aux analyses des productions recueillies, la dernière partie s’efforce de reconfigurer les activités langagières dans le cadre de la didactique du français et de sérier les domaines de compétence dans lesquels s’exerce la pratique narrative d’élèves âgés d’une dizaine d’années, comme le sont ceux que nous avons soumis à notre investigation / The thesis is based on a collection of 48 narrative productions, oral and written, collected from pupils enrolled in the CM2 class at two schools in Metz and Libreville. The instruction - identical in both situations - consisted in asking the students to tell a story that had happened to them and that had struck them. From this empirical collection, we sought to evaluate the narrative competence of the pupils as "qualitatively" as several comparisons helped us to do (the two productions of the same pupil, the written productions of the French class, etc.) After a first part which proceeds to different frames - theoretical andMethodologies - the analyzes of the collected productions are considered from the point of view of the internal temporality of the processes (the progress, the simultaneity and the regression of the reported facts) as suggested by the analyzes of Bres (2001). As for the evaluation of the cohesion of the discourse produced, we based our studies on coherence and cohesion (Adam, 2011, Charolles 1988) to consider production from a global point of view - Of narrativity - on what they seem to indicate as meaningful intention. We then considered the intermediate level of the textplanes and their cohesion, that is to say, the chaining of utterances and the phenomena of bonding (or rupture) which, not strictly syntactic, underlie this cohesion. Throughout this work, we have avoided an overly normative and micro-structural conception of the errors encountered. After a second part devoted to the analyzes of the collected productions, the last part attempts to reconfigure the linguistic activities within the framework of the didactics of French and to set out the areas of competence in which the narrative practice is practiced Of students aged about ten years, as are those we have submitted to our investigation