Maintenance of Water Distribution Systems

The efficient long term management of large-scale public funded assets is an area of growing importance. Ageing infrastructure, growth, and limited capital all result in the need for more robust and rigorous methodology to prioritise rehabilitation and renewal decisions and more importantly, to forecast future expenditure requirements. The overall objective of this research is to develop a Bayesian-based decision support system that will facilitate the identification of efficient asset management policies. This paper focuses on areas of research relating to the long term management of water distribution systems and in particular, will present: 1) A general review of existing practice and research; 2) development and initial results for an object oriented discrete event simulation, and 3) proposed future research and development.