Utilizing Risk Management & Technology for Collection System Resiliency

Purpose: Attendees of this presentation will gain an understanding of how the latest trends within asset management and risk management can be leveraged with today's technology to drive decision making in wastewater system planning. These solutions can be integrated as a holistic tool to manage system resiliency and provide a return on investment. Benefits of Presentation: When we think about advancements in technology and software innovation, the wastewater industry does not necessarily come to the top of everyone's mind. However, our industry has evolved into a much more data-driven community and is finding new and more valuable ways to take advantage of these innovations. In fact, the wastewater industry is in the middle of a significant digital revolution that is continuing to evolve. We see new software platforms being introduced all the time across a variety of functions within the wastewater industry, including asset management, GIS systems, operations and maintenance, design, and construction. While the wastewater industry has evolved with these new software solutions, utilities have also been evolving. Today, we collect more data in these systems than at any other time in history. Utilities increasingly interact with their systems and view these systems through data and computers. Over the last decades, utility planning, operations, and management have been slowly moving from the physical to the digital world and seeking the ability to do more with less through the use of data. Operators use digital information through Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) platforms to monitor and control utility systems. Planners use computerized hydraulic models to forecast how the systems will react to a change. Asset managers use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to predict the useful lifespan of the assets. In all these cases, utilities interact with the system digital model instead of the physical system. Now the question becomes how do we use this data and these digital tools to collaboratively manage wastewater system assets and plan for a resilient wastewater utility? How do we manage aging infrastructure while also managing wet weather issues and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) tactics? Recent innovations allow utilities to further advance through the digital transformation lifecycle, which takes us from collecting and warehousing data to making informed decisions. To take full advantage, utilities need to integrate principal foundations of risk management coupled with technological innovations including data visualization and analytics to develop a collaborative decision support platform that integrates risk models, O&M program data and GIS. The City of Shreveport (City) embarked on a mission to better refine how to focus spending on their wastewater utility by building a digital tool, a risk model, to better understand how to utilize years of sanitary sewer evaluation survey (SSES) data to make more informed decisions. It began with adopting risk management principles that considers the Likelihood of Failure (LoF) coupled with the Consequence of Failure (CoF) for their wastewater assets including gravity sewers and sanitary manholes. Together, the LoF and CoF risk mechanisms are calculated to inform Business Risk Exposure (BRE), or in other words, overall risk to the City. The audience will learn about the development of LoF factors which consider NASSCO compliant sewer assessment data, as well material properties, external pipe/manhole characteristics and system hydraulics. Collectively, these groups are weighted and combined to compute an overall LoF risk on a 1-10 rating scale. The presentation will cover CoF, which includes a variety of factors developed around a triple bottom line approach which considers impacts to economic, environmental, and social impacts of a failing asset. Similarly, CoF weights these individual cohort groups and computes a single CoF score on a 1-10 rating scale. Collectively, once these values are computed, BRE is able to be determined on a 100 point scale by considering both LoF and CoF components. Once the LoF, CoF and BRE values are determined for individual asset rankings, the audience will learn how sensitivity within the risk model can be assessed to evaluate the impacts of the weighting of contributing factors in the scoring. Finally, the audience will benefit from understanding how risk modeling can be coupled with advancements in geospatial tools and data visualization tools (dashboards) to better define how risk is distributed throughout the wastewater collection system, considering not only quantitatively, but also spatially to answer where and how individual asset rankings may have more commonalities based on when and where the assets were constructed. Advancements in technology promote the ability to keep the risk modeling up-to-date on a routine basis considering new inspections inventories, updates to assets in the field and changes within other analytical tools used to compute risk. The audience will gain an understanding of how the fundamentals of risk management can utilize new innovations in technology and software to develop more informed decision support systems Status of Completion: The City of Shreveport has finished the modeling, sensitivity testing and development of digital tools to support the understanding of risk. Risk Management is constantly evolving, the audience will be informed of how the digital tools currently are deployed and discussions about the maintenance protocols and continuous improvements that are planned for the future. Conclusion: We need to ask ourselves how to use technology and innovation to collaboratively manage and improve long-term wastewater system resiliency. The answer is through utilizing the foundations of risk management and coupling them with the use of emerging software tools including data visualization, analytics, and data processing tools. By coupling risk management and technological innovation, we can evolve in how we manage our wastewater systems and focus spending money where it is most needed. These tools allow us to prioritize resolution of the issues impacting communities such as aging wastewater systems, operation and maintenance strategies and wet weather management.