Innovation results of IAM planning in urban water services.

The requirement to provide urban water services continuously while infrastructures are ageing, imposes the need for increasingly sustainable infrastructure asset management (IAM). To achieve and maintain adequate levels of service, the AWARE-P IAM methodology has been applied in collaborative projects launched by the National Civil Engineering Laboratory, in partnership with IST (Technical University of Lisbon), Addition (software company) and several water utilities. The objective of these projects is to support urban water utilities in the development, implementation and maintenance of IAM plans. To guarantee the success of IAM planning, following the AWARE-P IAM methodology, utilities are required to: consider that the infrastructure has system behaviour and lifespan is indefinite and guarantee the full-alignment of IAM planning with organisation objectives. By analysing the strategic and tactical plans of participating utilities, the proposed methodology principles are discussed and supported. The main innovation results from the implementation of IAM planning are also presented and discussed, including the challenges of setting up an IAM process, together with the major benefits and drawbacks that come up when developing IAM plans. The results were demonstrated by the effective implementation of 16 strategic and 14 tactical IAM plans by the participating utilities.

A service-oriented approach to assessing the infrastructure value index.

Many national and regional administrations are currently facing challenges to ensure long-term sustainability of urban water services, as infrastructures continue to accumulate alarming levels of deferred maintenance and rehabilitation. The infrastructure value index (IVI) has proven to be an effective tool to support long-term planning, in particular by facilitating the ability to communicate and to create awareness. It is given by the ratio between current value of an infrastructure and its replacement cost. Current value is commonly estimated according to an asset-oriented approach, which is based on the concept of useful life of individual components. The standard values assumed for the useful lives can vary significantly, which leads to valuations that are just as different. Furthermore, with water companies increasingly focused on the customer, effective service-centric asset management is essential now more than ever. This paper shows results of on-going research work, which aims to explore a service-oriented approach for assessing the IVI. The paper presents the fundamentals underlying this approach, discusses and compares results obtained from both perspectives and points to challenges that still need to be addressed.

Boosting innovation in the water sector--the role and lessons learned from collaborative projects.

A key worldwide challenge in most sectors is to boost the effective adoption of innovation, as underpinned by the new European Union research programme Horizon 2020, which focuses on increasing innovation in Europe from 2014 to 2020. This is particularly relevant in the water sector, often perceived as conservative and averse to change. This paper discusses the role that collaborative knowledge-transfer projects can play in effectively rolling out R&D in the water industry. LNEC (Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil) has designed a structured model based on a phased programme and a network of utilities and researchers. The paper presents the core principles, the rationale, the model and methods used, and the theoretical background, as well as the project's impact, outcomes and products. The discussion highlights the lessons learnt and provides a formal analysis of the advantages of focusing on middle management as an effective entry point, even if innovation is needed across the organization. Making training materials, guidelines, use cases, data and software publicly available after the project's end has proven to have a decisive multiplying effect. The paper also argues in favour of the collaborative model as a basis for R&D sustainability, and details on-going and planned developments.

Prioritization of rehabilitation interventions for urban water assets using multiple criteria decision-aid methods.

The aim of this paper is to compare sorting and ranking methods for prioritization of rehabilitation interventions of sewers, taking into account risk, performance and cost. For that purpose multiple criteria decision-aid (MCDA) methods such as ELECTRE TRI for sorting and ELECTRE III for ranking are applied in a real case-study and the results obtained are compared. The case study is a small sanitary sewer system from a Portuguese utility located in the metropolitan area of Lisbon. The problem to investigate is the prioritization of the sewer candidates for rehabilitation. The decision maker (a panel group of specialists) has chosen five assessment measures: water level and maximum flow velocity (hydraulic performance indices), sewer importance and failure repair cost (collapse-related consequences of failure) and the risk of collapse. The results show that the outcomes from ELECTRE III are easier to understand than those from ELECTRE TRI method. Two different sets of weights were used, and the sorting and ranking results from both methods were found to be sensitive to them. ELECTRE TRI method is not straightforward as it involves technical parameters that are difficult to define, such as reference profiles and cut levels.