Asset Management by Finnish water and sewage works

Significant investments in maintenance of ageing water and sewer systems will be needed in the future to maintain the reliability and value of this buried asset also in Finland. Investments in rehabilitation of pipelines should be well-timed and allocated so that the quality of service, i.e. water quality, price and delivery reliability, will stay on an acceptable level despite the limited budget. Four Finnish water works, a Finnish software company and VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) are co-operating in a research project whose main objective is to develop methods for criticality assessment of water and sewer systems from the quality of service point of view. On the basis of criticality assessments the water works can prove the importance of rehabilitation activities and illustrate the consequences of different decisions for decision-makers. The data collected by the four co-operating cities will be exploited in these tasks. Research will clarify the most essential technical parameters of water and sewer systems from the reliability point of view. Tacit knowledge in the form of expert information complements the data acquired from information systems