Water Network-Failure Data Assessment

Abstract

The water-supply system is one of the basic and most important critical infrastructures. Water supply service disruption (water quality or quantity) may have serious consequences in modern societies. Water supply service is subject to various failure modes. Failure modes are specified by their degradation mechanisms, criticality, occurrence frequency and intensity. These failure modes have a random nature that impacts on the network disruption indicators, such as disruption frequency, network downtime, network repair time and network back-to-service time, i.e., the network resilience. This paper focuses on the water leakage failure mode. The water leakage failure mode assessment considers the unavoidable annual real water losses and the infrastructure leakage index recommended by the International Water Association’s Water Loss Task Force specialist group. Probabilistic statistical modelling was implemented to assess the seasonal index, the failure rates and the expectation value of the “mean time between failures.” The assessment is based on real operational data of the network. Specific attention is paid to the sensitivity of failures to seasonal variations. The presented methodology of the analysis of the water leakage failure mode is extendable to other failure modes and can help in developing new strategies in the management of the water-supply system in normal operation and crisis situations.