This paper aims to enable the relevant use of water main service lifetime and failure data to build a medium or long term infrastructure management plan. Firstly, how to estimate the service lifetime distribution of water mains using observations of decommissioning times which are possibly left-truncated and predominantly right-censored, is shown. Three methods are presented: a non-parametric method another based on the parametric Weibull distribution, and a third based on the parametric Herz distribution. An application with actual data related to grey cast iron water mains of two large French and German water distribution networks illustrates the implementation of the theoretical methods. The paper then investigates the link between failure rate and pipe renewal, and discusses the use of observation-based service time survival functions for infrastructure asset management.
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Research Article|
March 01 2013
Is the service life of water distribution pipelines linked to their failure rate?
Yves Le Gat;
1REBX, IRSTEA-Bordeaux, 50 avenue de Verdun, 33612 Cestas Cedex, France
E-mail: yves.legat@irstea.fr
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Ingo Kropp;
Ingo Kropp
23S Consult GmbH, Nieritzstraße 5, 01097 Dresden, Germany
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Matthew Poulton
Matthew Poulton
3WTSim, Impasse Fauré, 33000 Bordeaux, France
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Water Supply (2013) 13 (2): 386–393.
Article history
Received:
August 08 2011
Accepted:
July 23 2012
Citation
Yves Le Gat, Ingo Kropp, Matthew Poulton; Is the service life of water distribution pipelines linked to their failure rate?. Water Supply 1 March 2013; 13 (2): 386–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.2166/ws.2013.089
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