Community-Driven and Reliability-Based Budget Allocation for Water Networks

City managers and elected officials in many municipalities are frequently faced with the challenge to cater for public expectations on one hand and to comply with technical/engineering requirements on the other. This paper presents a four phased level of service driven reliability based methodology for allocation of budget to water mains. This methodology comprises of: (1) development of an Analytical Hierarchy model of LoS; (2) a sub-network criticality model to account for certain quantitative and qualitative characteristics of a given sub-network (3) a sub-network reliability assessment model and 4) a budget allocation model. Combination of the above contradicting requirements, i.e. level of service and network reliability, is expected to assist decision makers in quantifying the required condition improvement to meet service goals and to make more informed decisions on interventions and relayed priorities. To show the robustness of the developed models, a hypothetical case study is developed and analyzed.