Our industry has become too familiar with numerous reports from a variety of reputable agencies that collectively conclude with an important message: our assets are aging and the funding gap between what is needed and what is available is growing. In the State of Michigan alone, for example, the 21st Century Infrastructure Report concludes that many of the state’s more than 1,300 community systems were built nearly a half or a full century ago. Compounding the problem is the fact that a large percentage of our municipalities are not the big, metropolitan cities that we hear in the news. Another example, North Carolina, being the 9th most populated state in the country, is home to nearly 550 water systems and nearly half of those have less than 2,000 service connections. This presentation aims to find an answer to the following question: can advanced technology help small and medium sized communities address their infrastructure challenges in a cost effective and timely manner? Several key findings from advanced statistical data mining analyses of sanitary sewer condition data will be discussed, which lends itself to a unique and simple condition evaluation procedure. The concept of artificial intelligence will be introduced, and the “face recognition” functionality be adopted to asset condition evaluation. The presentation concludes with how this approach, coupled with intelligent dashboard tools, enabled the effective condition assessment of a community’s collection system.

Contributor/Source

Murat Ulasir

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