Houston's Intelligent Planning Tool for Prioritizing and Optimizing Rehabilitation of Gravity Pipe

Wastewater collection and treatment system plays a critical role in facilitating sustainable urban environment. Maintaining complex wastewater infrastructure, with varied range of assets and functionalities, is extremely challenging. For the City of Houston (COH), providing quality service in the wastewater sector is even more demanding due to rapidly increasing population and diverse industrial and commercial growth. To confront the challenge with modern technology, COH envisioned an intelligent planning tool to prioritize and optimize rehabilitation of its gravity pipe network by integrating asset inventory, field inspections and machine-learning models into a data-driven predictive analytics platform. This paper illustrates the underlying modules of the tool with their analytical framework. It also explains application of the tool to analyze future risk levels in different scenarios and optimize rehabilitation strategies.