Uncovering Hidden Value In Pipe Risk Prioritization And Replacement Optimization

A risk model can rank pipes, but turning those rankings into construction-ready projects is where planning time tends to disappear. For a California utility with 41 water systems and roughly 2,900 miles of main, the manual review needed to group and prioritize model output had become a bottleneck. This case study looks at how an updated likelihood and consequence of failure model, spatial clustering, and multi-objective optimization were combined to weigh risk reduction against cost and community disruption. It also includes a perspective from Mark Insco, Engineering Planning Manager at Golden State Water, on pipes and combinations the team had not previously prioritized.

Read the full case study to see how the approach was built and what it set up for future analysis.