Infrastructure Asset Management of Urban Water Systems

Abstract

Urban water systems are the most valuable part of the public infrastructure worldwide, and utilities and municipalities are entrusted with the responsibility of managing and expanding them for current and future generations. Infrastructures inexorably age and degrade, while society places increasing demands for levels of service, risk management and sustainability. As many systems reach high levels of deferred maintenance and rehabilitation (ASCE, 2009), the combined replacement value of such infrastructures is overwhelming, demanding judi‐ cious spending and efficient planning. Infrastructure asset management (IAM) of urban water infrastructures is the set of processes that utilities need to have in place in order to ensure that infrastructure performance corre‐ sponds to service targets over time, that risks are adequately managed, and that the corre‐ sponding costs, in a lifetime cost perspective, are as low as possible. IAM methods partially differ from those applicable to managing other types of assets. One of the reasons is the fact that such infrastructures have indefinite lives, in order to satisfy the permanent needs of a specific public service. Infrastructures are not replaceable as a whole, only piecemeal. Consequently, in a mature infrastructure, all phases of assets lifetime coex‐ ist. Additionally, in network-based infrastructures, it is frequently not feasible to allocate levels of service to individual components because there is a dominant system behavior (e.g. symptoms and their causes often occur at different locations)