Collection and Compilation of Water Pipeline Field Performance Data

The objective of this project is to collect, compile and analyze high quality field data on pipeline reliability performance for water pipelines of different materials. This project will be completed in two phases: Phase I will include the data collection from the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and their 17 Western States, as well as the U.S., Canadian, and Australian Water Utilities for different materials including cast iron, ductile iron, reinforced concrete, steel, pre-stressed concrete, PVC, AC, and others. Canadian and Australian utilities’ data and knowledge will be stored as a subset of the national pipeline database. Phase I will also include the development of a Web-based, GIS-enabled water pipelines database to aggregate and standardize the collected data, and further to identify the missing data deemed critical to understanding water pipeline performance. These tasks will be geared to meet the Phase II objectives of collecting and/or generating the missing data, and the establishment of an understanding of the general state of buried water pipeline infrastructure, failure rates, general effectiveness of corrosion control measures, and the calculation of failure rates for each water pipeline material. Virginia Tech will protect data and database as per federal requirements under export-import control law. The proposed research has the following five objectives: Developing a standardized data and metadata structure for verifying, storing, updating, retrieving, and exporting/importing water pipeline infrastructure attributes; Creating a GIS-driven Web-based platform for developing, analyzing, validating, implementing, and benchmarking of models and tools for pipeline asset management; Piloting of PIPEiD with utilities of various sizes across the U.S. for demonstration; Establishing a protocol for water pipeline data security, sanitization, and publication; and Developing a plan to promote and sustain effort by engaging the water industry. This paper presents the national effort for water pipeline data collection and compilation methodologies. This project will determine the state of the knowledge in water utilities, other industries, and large Internet of Things (IoT) firms to lay the groundwork to identify key issues that can be addressed by data collection and big data analytics for water pipeline infrastructure systems.