Data base development for water facilities management, and component and network reliability analysis

Water utilities are faced with a difficult challenge of assessing the physical condition of their distribution systems. Since the majority of mains are buried, utilities must rely upon indirect methods, including analysis of repair records. One of the major problems facing many water authorities all over the world in managing their water mains is the availability of adequate and reliable data. A data base management system is developed to reduce the time required for record maintenance and to make information on water mains status more readily available to the decision makers. The availability of powerful Data Base Management System (DBMS) packages makes entering, storing, retrieving, and file manipulating water system's data quite simple. It saves time and effort and resources. A complete theoretical development of the underlying methodology is presented. A data base which may be used for facilities management was developed for the City of Pittsburgh. The use of the data base for network reliability analysis is explained and illustrated. Three other data bases were developed for the reliability analysis. With this analysis the reliability surface for the network may be determined. It may be used to determine when and where will system maintenance and rehabilitation improve the supply reliability most. Another use of the data base was for developing a component reliability model using survival analysis. Component failure data for New Haven, CN was used for this purpose.