Reliability Modelling For Asset Management in South East Water

Over the years, the reliability modelling of water assets has generated increasing interest among both researchers and practitioners. Statistical methods and software packages for assessing asset reliability have been developed in order to improve asset availability, indirectly reduce water losses, and hence improve the efficiency of water assets. OFWAT, which is the economic regulator of the water sector in England and Wales, aims to ensure that water companies operate under their statutory functions and have sufficient financial means to perform these functions adequately. Water companies need to prepare a five-year business plan for OFWAT, in order to certify they have enough capital and are transparent when carrying out their statutory functions. Hence, this thesis aims to analyse the reliability of two selected types of assets at South East Water to help plan their future investments on vehicles and future maintenance costs on borehole assets.

This thesis will provide an extensive literature review on reliability modelling in water distribution networks. An MS Excel-based decision support system will be developed for both vehicles and borehole assets, using data collected from South East Water. For the transport model, a block replacement policy will be developed by using Visual Basic, to obtain the optimum time of replacing a vehicle. Performance analysis will be conducted on the borehole data to pinpoint the worst performers among the 16 boreholes under analysis.