Maintenance Priority Assignment for Isolation Valves in Water Distribution Systems

A water distribution network (WDN) requires the closure of isolation valves to isolate malfunctioning pipes from the system. As water infrastructure ages, the condition of isolation valves is deteriorating. However, it is impractical to maintain all isolation valves in a system due to resource constraints. This study presents a method that ranks the maintenance priority of valves based on their consequence of failure. Specifically, the proposed method utilizes hydraulic simulation, network analysis, and clustering techniques to rank valves. The high-ranked valves are recommended to be maintained, saving precious resources for utilities for other tasks, such as aging pipe replacement. Simulation on a real-life WDN in the East Bay, the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area, shows that the proposed valve maintenance method can potentially reduce the direct and indirect risk for the tested network, especially under high valve failure rate cases, which is likely to be the case when natural hazard occurs such as earthquakes.