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For the last few decades, concerns have repeatedly been raised about deteriorating water mains in Canada. Small to medium sized water utilities are generally impacted more due to lack of technical and financial resources. This paper presents a user-friendly life cycle cost (LCC) analysis-based decision support tool to help these utility managers to prioritize water mains rehabilitation or replacement (R/R) strategies. The deterioration curves for water mains of different materials and sizes have been developed based on their likelihood of failure. The proposed model is implemented for the water supply network of City of Kelowna (Canada). It compares the costs of various R/R scenarios for each pipe over its life cycle and suggests the most cost-effective decision to the managers to efficiently allocate their limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online drinking water quality monitoring technologies have made significant progress for source water surveillance and water treatment plant operation. The use of these technologies in the distribution system has not been favorable due to the high costs associated with installation, maintenance, and calibration of a large distributed array of monitoring sensors. This has led to a search for newer technologies that can be economically deployed on a large scale. This paper includes a brief description of important parameters for drinking water and current available technologies used in the field. The paper also provides a thorough review of the advances in sensor technology for measurement of common water quality parameters (pH, turbidity, free chlorine, dissolved oxygen, and conductivity) in drinking water distribution systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Loss of water due to leakage is a common phenomenon observed practically in all water distribution systems (WDS). However, the leakage volume can be reduced significantly if the occurrence of leakage is detected within minimal time after its occurrence. This paper proposes a novel methodology to detect and diagnose leakage in WDS. In the proposed methodology, a fuzzy-based algorithm has been employed that incorporates various uncertainties into different WDS parameters such as roughness, nodal demands, and water reservoir levels. Monitored pressure in different nodes and flow in different pipes have been used to estimate the degree of membership of leakage and its severity in terms of index of leakage propensity (ILP). Based on the degrees of leakage memberships and the ILPs, the location of the nearest leaky node or leaky pipe has been identified. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, a small distribution network was investigated which showed very encouraging results. The proposed methodology has a significant potential to help water utility managers to detect and locate leakage in WDS within a minimal time after its occurrence and can help to prioritise leakage management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]