Water Asset Management International 4.1 (2008) 15-18

Assessing the benefits of rehabilitation programmes defined with the CARE-W decision support system

Pascal Le Gauffre, H. Haidar

LGCIE, INSA-Lyon, France

David Poinard

Veolia Eau, France

CARE-W_ARP is a multicriteria decision support software prototype for the construction of annual rehabilitation programmes of water networks. It was developed within the CARE-W European research project (Computer Aided Rehabilitation of Water networks, 2001-2004). Two main components may be distinguished in ARP: a) a set of criteria was formulated for the purpose of assessing and comparing water mains; criteria related to the various consequences of pipe failures (leaks and bursts) are expressed by using risk concepts; b) a multicriteria ranking procedure was developed, based on the ELECTRE Tri outranking method. This procedure assigns each pipe to one out of six possible priority levels. Within two Ph-D studies,CARE-W_ARP was used as a research tool. Full scale experiments and critical analyses were conducted with data on the asset stocks of Reggio Emilia (It) and Lyon (F). These two research studies proposed new developments and provided original results. A new criteria formulation was proposed to assess the efficiency of rehabilitation projects and a second set of criteria was defined for assessing and comparing rehabilitation programmes. A comparison between four scenarios tested in Lyon shows that a rehabilitation programme elaborated with the support of CARE-W_ARP provides higher benefits than other scenarios. An experiment with data from Reggio Emilia provided similar conclusions. In this paper, Pascal Le Gauffre, H. Haidar and David Poinard discuss the results from these studies.

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