Management, Economics and Policy
Decentralized Wastewater System Reliability Analysis Handbook
Publication Date: June 2005
Cooperating Institution: Stone Environmental, Inc.
Principal Investigator: Scott Johnstone
Project Budget: $245,000
Project Identifier: WU-HT-03-57
DESCRIPTION
Decentralized systems are a permanent part of the wastewater infrastructure, and understanding what works to improve their performance is crucial to allocating scarce resources to hardware and management. While using an asset management framework for centralized wastewater system management has become common in some countries, asset management has not been used in the decentralized field.
One of the main barriers to using asset management in the decentralized field has been information about the reliability of decentralized wastewater treatment systems and their components. Understanding the performance of the elements of decentralized wastewater systems and having the capacity to evaluate that performance against engineering, ecological, public health, and socioeconomic goals will help realize the use of asset management to evaluate the effects of different management approaches on performance and to choose the least-cost way of meeting performance goals.
Developing a framework though which a practitioner may select appropriate asset management and reliability assessment tools and then understanding the tools available to practitioners represent the critical elements of this project. A handbook will be developed to allow for the results of this work to be easily incorporated into the decision making of communities, regulators, and the design community. A list of future research needs, data needs and potential additional useful tools will be incorporated into the handbook as well.
The research team includes nationally and internationally recognized experts in the fields of decentralized wastewater treatment, reliability analysis, and asset management. Two national workshops will be held during the course of the project to allow the project to gain from the wide experience of other experts in these fields.