Return to search

Methodology to Enhance the Reliability of Drinking Water Pipeline Performance Analysis

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 / 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. 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. This study presents the methodology that can enhance the reliability of model results for water pipeline performance analysis which can potentially help water utilities to be proactive in fixing or replacing the pipelines with confidence. Different types of analyses on the data received from the two large water utilities (name confidential) were performed to understand and check the application of the proposed methodology in the real world and was found that it can potentially help water utilities gain confidence in their analyses results by statistically signifying the result

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84401
Date25 July 2018
CreatorsPatel, Pruthvi Shaileshkumar
ContributorsCivil and Environmental Engineering, Sinha, Sunil Kumar, Sears, Lee, Leon, Roberto T.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Page generated in 0.0024 seconds