Technical Performance Assessment of Urban Sewer Systems1
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 19, Issue 4
Abstract
Performance assessment in urban water infrastructures is an increasingly important field of knowledge. Performance has traditionally been expressed in a variety of ways relating mostly to local design practice, with hardly any consensus on how it should be measured or compared. The efficient technical management of these systems deserves a specific approach, suited to the methodologies regularly employed while planning, designing, constructing, operating, and maintaining the systems. At the engineering level, decisions are based on operational, physical, and resources data and on analyses deploying simulation models, geographic information systems, or other information systems. However, such tools tend to produce vast amounts of insufficiently aggregated or performance-oriented information. This paper presents a performance assessment system that is based on the decisional concept of utility functions and designed as a technical analysis tool with the purpose of shifting the focus of technical management of urban drainage systems to a performance-oriented view.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been developed in the scope of two projects: “A New Approach for Diagnosis and Rehabilitation of Urban Sewerage Systems—Modeling of Hydraulic and Environmental Performance Indicators” and “Mitigation of the Risk of Constructed Infrastructure Degradation”; both projects were partially financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Portugal, under the PRAXIS XXI and the “Research in Government Laboratories” Programs, respectively. Acknowledgments are also due to SANEST S.A., the Estoril Coast sewer system utility, for allowing access to their networks and providing data for the case studies.
References
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Published In
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 19 • Issue 4 • November 2005
Pages: 339 - 346
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Received: Aug 6, 2003
Accepted: Jan 7, 2004
Published online: Nov 1, 2005
Published in print: Nov 2005
Notes
Presented as a poster at the 9th International Conference on Urban Drainage, September 2002, Portland, Ore.
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