New development of pipe-network management in Kobe City

Distribution pipelines now require a lot of maintenance and mass renewal. We need to determine measures to maintain water quality and to carry out reconstruction of the pipeline system. In addition, the mass retirement of engineers also provides us with a serious challenge on how to transfer their knowledge and skill. In 2008 Kobe City established Kobe Waterworks Vision 2017, in which plans have been set out to realize ‘safety’, ‘relief’, ‘sustainability’ and so on. In order to realize the vision in the field of distribution pipelines, pipe-network reconstruction and the Manual for Water Safety Control in Distribution Network are the key practices to achieve the highest level of pipe-network management. In this paper, we present the outline and application example of these practices.