Abstract

A Holistic Approach to Water Infrastructure Management
Track: Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater
Authors: Grant Raudenbush

Using GIS as a decision support system means providing critical information about the location, and condition of water utility assets. Municipal leaders, executives and finance directors recognize the value of increased system knowledge and are breaking away from reactionary maintenance and are instead taking a more proactive, holistic approach to addressing their aging water infrastructure.

As a result, many utilities have started actively conducting inventories and condition assessments of their water infrastructure assets; valves, hydrants, meters and transmission and distribution mains. As well as aggregating, maintaining and analyzing this data in GIS.

This presentation will discuss methods to:
•Assess the risk of failure of their water infrastructure
•Prioritize water infrastructure repair and replacement projects
•Utilize operational resources and capital funds
•Reduce non-revenue water (water loss)
•And the value of collecting condition assessment data of critical water infrastructure assets and analyzing assets against other system components in a geometric network.