Design and Development of a Web-Based National Database for Water and Wastewater Pipeline Infrastructure Systems

This paper presents a national database project title WATERiD: WATER infrastructure DATABASE for Water and Wastewater Pipelines. This project is funded by the Water Environmental Research Foundation (WERF) through the Environmental Protection Agency's Aging Water Infrastructure Research Program, a research agenda that supports efforts to put the nation's aging infrastructure on a pathway toward sustainability and resiliency. This paper describes in detail methodology for design and development of the WATERiD and its two major thrust areas: (a) Condition Assessment and (b) Renewal Engineering. Condition Assessment (CA) is the collection of data and information through direct and/or indirect methods, followed by analysis of the data and information to make a determination of the current and/or future structural and hydraulic condition of the pipeline. Renewal Engineering (RE) includes a wide range of repair, rehabilitation, replacement techniques that bring the pipeline system at acceptable levels of performance within budgets. The decision-making process for the proper balance of repair, rehabilitation and replacement is a function of the condition assessment of the pipe, the life-cycle cost of the various renewal engineering options, and the related risk reductions. Due to the deteriorating and aging infrastructure nationwide, it is critical that water and wastewater utility managers and others have access to current and relevant information on condition assessment and renewal engineering technologies so that resources can be utilized most effectively. The WATERiD project aims to provide an open source, common foundation upon which not only can basic information be shared, but to also support the evolution of new functionality through the development of novel web applications and services. WATERiD consists of four main modules: 1) Pipeline Condition Assessment Technologies and Management Practices; 2) Renewal Engineering Technologies and Management Practices; 3) Subsurface Utility Engineering Technologies and Management Practices; and 4) Cost Information related to Technologies Use. All components are implemented using Content Management System to encourage cross-platform deployment. To demonstrate the usage of WATERiD, a detailed web-application supporting data/information storage, update, retrieval, and dissemination has been developed with 87 participating utilities in U.S. and 25 international. Ultimately, the goal of Web-based Knowledgebase is to promote the wide-scale development and usage of WATERiD and applications within utilities, consultants, and research communities.