Risk Assessment for Water Mains Using Fuzzy Approach

Abstract

The concept of responding to the risk of water pipelines failure has been undergoing through a great change from being active to being proactive to failure events by planning for rehabilitation plans that maintain the water main in good working conditions. This paper designs a framework to evaluate the risk of water main failure using hierarchal fuzzy expert system. There are sixteen risk-of-failure factors that represent both the probability of failure and the negative consequences of failure event and are categorized into four main risk-of-failure factors. A risk of failure model is built that evaluates the risk of pipelines failure using Fuzzy Expert System technique that accounts for the uncertainty usually encountered when evaluating the risk of failure. Some of the findings are that the pipe age gives a strong indication of the condition of the water mains, then, the pipe material and breakage rate come into play, and that the damage to surroundings/business disruption has the most negative impact of a failure event.