Condition Assessment of Water Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

Several services, such as water supply for urban use and irrigation, renewal energy generation through hydropower plants, and flood protection provided by hydraulic infrastructures, have become critical in our societies. Population growth, climate change, and infrastructure aging, among other factors, are challenging our capacities to keep delivering water-related services at the required performance standards, in a sustainable manner, and with an acceptable level of risk.

Management of water infrastructures under the asset management principles and methodologies has become a key issue for organizations and stakeholders in the water sector. Condition assessment of physical assets plays a key role in the overall framework of asset management, as it impacts different aspects, such as capital investment decision-making, operations and maintenance decision-making, lifecycle value realization, maintenance delivery, reliability of service, and fault and incident response.

This Special Issue focuses on condition assessment of water infrastructures, including storage facilities (dams and appurtenant works), diversion and flood protection facilities (dams, weirs, levees), hydropower facilities (dams, waterways, penstocks, turbines), water mains (open channels, pressure pipes), water distribution networks, urban drainage facilities, including sustainable urban drainage systems, wastewater treatment plants, and water purification plants, among others. The scope of condition assessment includes civil works, electromechanical and electrical equipment, and facilities associated to large infrastructures such as buildings and roads.

We invite submissions addressing a broad range of topics, including:

1. Condition assessment of water infrastructures based upon online continuous monitoring techniques;
2. Condition assessment of water infrastructures with offline measurements;
3. Condition assessment of water infrastructures using indirect approaches, based on operational and environmental parameters, and statistical data of failures and incidents;
4. Condition assessment with indirect approaches, using asset age and current value estimations, including information from maintenance efforts;
5. Definition of different condition indices for water infrastructures and its use in the physical asset management context;
6. Links of condition assessment of water infrastructures with Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence;
7. Selection of optimal, cost-effective condition assessment techniques and strategies at different managerial and planning scales, considering the scope of the analysis;
8. Use of condition assessment in the management of water infrastructures under a lifecycle perspective, and the impact on planning and decisions related to repairs, upgrades, or renewals;
9. Use of infrastructure condition information in risk assessments in the physical asset management context.

Dr. Luis Altarejos-García
Dr. Juan Tomás García-Bermejo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• water infrastructure
• asset management
• asset condition
• condition assessment
• condition indices
• lifecycle
• risk