Maintenance Strategies for Sewerage Systems

The problem of decaying sewerage systems is a timely topic in many urban areas, due to its importance to societal needs and to the large amounts of capital expeditures needed to bring the concerned systems to an adequate level of serviceability. Thus, there is a need for better maintenance decision-making related to periodic inspection and cleaning, repair, rehabilitation or replacement of the equipment.

In this paper, an approach offering integrated solutions to upgrade such systems, taking into account existing and foreseen structural and hydraulic conditions, is presented. The methodology relies upon a heuristic algorithm scheduling maintenance events. An application to the Almada sewerage network illustrates the method. Future improvements including the use of statistical maintenance theoretic concepts and artificial intelligence approaches are also discussed.