Enhancement of limited water supply network data for deterioration modelling and determination of rehabilitation rate

In the past decades, the main focus of water supply management has moved from construction of new water supply networks to rehabilitation and adaptation of the existing infrastructure. The decision-making process for the rehabilitation management relies heavily on the quality of the applied deterioration model. A recurring problem in the application of such models relates to the quality and availability of network data. These data are often incomplete or unreliable because building measures and damages are only documented properly recently and the recovery of older data is difficult and expensive. A key point in rehabilitation planning is therefore data collection and data reconstruction. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to present a methodology for the enhancement of the available data of water supply networks and the prognosis of the necessary rehabilitation rates under limited data availability. Results indicate that the presented data reconstruction technique has advantages as compared to traditional data extrapolation. It also allows the reconstruction of fragmentary data about existing water supply and wastewater collection systems for the operating utilities. However, it cannot be used for reconstructing failure types as well as the whole information on pipes (e.g. more than two missing information).