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Minimizing the Risk Exposure Resulting from Asset Failures for Water/Wastewater Facility Owners

Date

2015

Authors

Gardner, Nichalos Dewey

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Abstract

Infrastructure is the foundation upon which a viable civilization is built. It is necessary to advance the economy and to sustain society’s basic needs. The infrastructure around the world is aging, but is not being maintained at a level that is keeping pace with deterioration. Some organizations have adopted Asset Management Programs in an effort to keep track of their assets and make predictions as to when assets will fail. Asset management programs are useful and have improved the position of facility owners, but do not specifically address the problem of business risk exposure caused by assets failing while in service. Prior research in this area has addressed the likelihood of failure, but has not looked at true risk to the system. The consequence of failure has always been an afterthought. Past work has also depended heavily on past system failures to address future failures and prediction. The goal of this research was to develop a framework that can be used to prioritize infrastructure maintenance and/or replacement by reducing the total system risk using information from the Asset Management Plan. An optimization model was developed that utilizes the likelihood of failure and the consequence of those failures to identify the total risk to the system. The model was run for different scenarios to determine what segments should be replaced to remove the greatest amount of risk from the system given some set amount of spending on the system. The framework developed by this work addresses an important gap in utility system maintenance and replacement prioritization.

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Keywords

Civil engineering, Asset Management, Capital Improvement, Infrastructure, Optimization, Water/Wastewater Pipelines

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