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Virginia Tech

Methodology to Enhance the Reliability of Drinking Water Pipeline Performance Analysis

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Currently, water utilities are facing monetary crises to maintain and expand services to meet the current as well as the future demands. Standard practice in pipeline infrastructure asset management is to collect data and predict the condition of pipelines using models and tools. Water utilities want to be proactive in fixing or replacing the pipes as fixing-when-it-fails ideology leads to increased cost and can affect environmental quality and societal health. There is a number of modeling techniques available for assessing the condition of the pipelines, but there is a massive shortage of methods to check the reliability of the results obtained using different modeling techniques. It is mainly because of the limited data one utility collects and absence of piloting of these models at various water utilities. In general, water utilities feel confident about their in-house condition prediction and failure models but are willing to utilize a reliable methodology which can overcome the issues related to the validation of the results. This paper presents the methodology that can enhance the reliability of model results for water pipeline performance analysis which can be used to parallel the output of the real system with confidence. The proposed methodology was checked using the dataset of two large water utilities and was found that it can potentially help water utilities gain confidence in their analyses results by statistically signifying the results.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Civil Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2018

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Patel, Pruthvi Shaileshkumar
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Sinha, Sunil Kumar
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Sears, Lee
  • Leon, Roberto T.

Subjects

dc:subject × 4

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:15742
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84401

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Patel, Pruthvi Shaileshkumar. Methodology to Enhance the Reliability of Drinking Water Pipeline Performance Analysis. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/84401