Journal of Hydroinformatics In Press, Uncorrected Proof © IWA Publishing 2012  |  doi:10.2166/hydro.2012.144

On the prediction of underground water pipe failures: zero inflation and pipe-specific effects

Theodoros Economou, Zoran Kapelan and Trevor C. Bailey

College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, North Park Road, Exeter EX4 4QF, UK. E-mail: t.economou@ex.ac.uk

First received 23 November 2010; accepted in revised form 2 February 2012. Available online 12 June 2012

The prediction of pipe failures in water distribution systems is an essential planning tool for water companies. Previous methods focus on the prediction of either future failure numbers or aspects of pipe condition. However, most of these only predict at the level of large pipe groups (of similar characteristics) and often cannot provide uncertainty bounds. Here, a new statistical method is developed to predict the probability of failure at the single pipe level. The method extends the Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) in two ways: firstly, it incorporates pipe-specific random effects to account for unmeasured information on the factors affecting the pipe failures. Secondly, the method explicitly accounts for zero inflation, that is the possibility that more zero failures occur than expected from a simple Poisson assumption. This zero-inflated NHPP (ZINHPP) model was applied to two real-life datasets, one from North America and one from New Zealand. The results clearly demonstrate improved prediction capability, especially in the New Zealand data, which contains a much larger percentage of pipes with zero failures.

Keywords: Bayesian mixture model; MCMC; random effects

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