Comparative Study of Three Stochastic Models for Prediction of Pipe Failures in Water Supply Systems
Publication: Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 19, Issue 4
Abstract
The prediction of pipe failures in urban water systems is a complex process because the available failure records, originating in work orders, are often short and incomplete. To identify a robust and simple model with good failure prediction results using short data history, three existing models were compared in this study: the single-variate Poisson process, the Weibull accelerated lifetime model, and the linear-extended Yule process. This work also presents modifications to these models that enable them to produce more accurate predictions and overcome computational issues for practical software implementation. The three models, together with the improvements where applicable, were applied to water supply system data provided by a Portuguese water utility, and the results were comparatively analysed to assess the accuracy of each model. The Weibull accelerated lifetime model yielded the best results among the three models, accurately predicting failures and detecting pipes with high failure likelihood; however, it is based on Monte Carlo simulations, which can be time-consuming. The linear extended Yule process could also effectively detect pipes with higher failure likelihood; however, it presented a clear tendency to overestimate the number of future failures. The single-variate Poisson process is the simplest of the three models and produced failure prediction results of lower quality.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge SMAS Oeiras e Amadora for providing the failure data and the complete pipe inventory and maintenance records, which were essential to the development of this study. A.M. thanks Sérgio Coelho for welcoming him into the urban water division (LNEC), and for providing all the conditions to develop this work. A.M. also thanks Maria do Céu Almeida for her guidance during the development of this work. This work was funded through the AWARE-P (EEA PT0043) and TRUST (EEA FP7-265122) projects. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.
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© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 15, 2012
Accepted: Feb 28, 2013
Published online: Mar 4, 2013
Discussion open until: Aug 4, 2013
Published in print: Dec 1, 2013
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