Computational Intelligence for Urban Infrastructure Condition Assessment: Water Transmission and Distribution Systems

Water transmission and distribution systems are critical urban infrastructure. The aging of water mains can lead to increased breakage rate, decreased hydraulic capacity, and deterioration of water quality. Condition assessment of water mains encompasses building computational model of failures, discerning distress indicators from inspection, rating health condition, and forecasting future failures. In this process, computational intelligence helps to achieve high-level awareness of system condition and facilitates the decision making in water main renewal and rehabilitation using the combined information from field knowledge, historical records, inspection results, and sensory data. This paper reviews computational approaches to achieve condition assessment of water mains. Inspection and sensor technologies involved in the assessment process are also briefly discussed.