Investment Strategy to Properly Maintain Water Networks

This article focuses on the problem of deciding the annual investment that a company should allocate to the rehabilitation of its water distribution and sanitation networks. The objective is to find the investment amount necessary to maintain an adequate quality and sustainability of the infrastructure. It is not a simple decision, as there are different criteria that may be of interest to the managing company. In this paper, we consider four criteria related to the reliability of individual pipes and the complete network. These indicators are the infrastructure value index, the average age of network pipes, the risk index and the probability of failure. A methodology is proposed to estimate the best annual investment by analysing the evolution of these indicators.