Water Infrastructure Asset Management

Water systems in developing countries are often not equipped to formulate sound maintenance and renewal prioritization plans, backed by state-of-the-art knowledge and tools. This lack of capacity renders the enormous investments in water infrastructure, mobilized by, among other initiatives, the SDGs, to be unsustainable.

Water Infrastructure Asset management is an essential component in the maintenance and improvement of services in water systems including utilities, irrigation systems and flood protection and water management infrastructure. It requires the identification of the most critical components of networks, life-cycle cost analysis and minimizing negative impacts of (inevitable) failures. This approach is vitally important for the urban centres of the South, as performance demands increase with the population at a phenomenal rate.

Often, cities in the South have inherited ageing infrastructure systems, incapable of providing a minimal level of services. At the same time, these cities are faced with unprecedented pressures to provide “more services with less”. This combined challenge calls for a systematic approach for maintenance, renewal and expansion decision making. In the urban water sector, this applies to water supply/transport & distribution systems, wastewater collection and treatment facilities, sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and flood protection infrastructure.

Non-urban water systems like irrigation systems, and large-scale flood protection work can also benefit from a sound application of asset management principles. Irrigation asset management is already a mature area, while applications in flood protection are emerging.

The rapid future change including climate change, land use & demographic changes and changes in practices has imposed new and interesting challenges on how asset management principles are applied. Time-tested principles like whole-life cost optimization as well as innovations like Real ‘in’ Options, artificial intelligence and big-data techniques have a prominent place in asset management in a rapidly changing environment.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to asset management
• Risk-based decision making in water infrastructure
• Case studies from around the wold
• Using modelling tools in WIAM
• Optimization and other AI techniques in WIAM
• Simple and effective data gathering, assimilation and management for beginner asset managers
• How to start IAM in an organization
• Field trips to water organizations in the Netherlands