An approach is developed for identifying key data to be used in asset management in general, and for predicting pipe breaks and selecting appropriate models in particular. The approach is applied to the District of Maple Ridge, B.C., Canada to identify the magnitude of a utility’s pipe burst problems today and in the future, enhance the development of pipe replacement priorities based on foreca...

There is a growing interest in the development of procedures for the design of structures exposed to multiple hazards. The goal is to achieve safer and/or more economical designs than would be the case if the structures were analyzed independently for each hazard and an envelope of the demands induced by each of the hazards were used for member sizing. We describe an optimization approach to mu...

A digital filtering algorithm for continuous base flow separation is compared to physically based simulations of base flow. It is shown that the digital filter gives comparable results to model simulations in terms of the multiyear base flow index when a filter coefficient is used that replicates the watershed-specific time delay of model simulations. This way, the application of the heuristic ...

Many studies of water flow and solute transport in the vadose zone require estimates of the unsaturated soil hydraulic properties, including the soil water retention curve ~WRC! describing the relationship between soil suction and water content. An artificial neural network ~ANN! approach was developed to describe the WRC using observed data from several soils. The ANN approach was found to pro...

Computer simulation plays an increasingly important role in engineering education as a tool for enhancing classroom learning. This research investigates the efficacy of using simulation in teaching the topic of transportation network growth through an experiment conducted at the Civil Engineering Department of the University of Minnesota. In the experiment, a network growth simulator program SO...

The effective use of pervious concrete in environmental site design requires consistent design procedures integrating the structural and material properties of the pervious concrete pavement with hydrologic performance of the pervious concrete system. Design procedures to size pervious concrete storm-water systems are presented based on criteria for freeze-thaw protection and drawdown reliabili...

This paper proposes a framework for using business and organizational scenario-planning techniques for regional strategic transportation-planning purposes. The paper provides a brief history of scenario planning as it emerged from business-strategic planning activities and gives an overview of its goals and limitations. The paper then reviews the context for scenario planning in regional transp...

The average bed and sidewall shear stresses in smooth rectangular open-channel flows are determined after solving the continuity and momentum equations. The analysis shows that the shear stresses are function of three components: (1) gravitational; (2) secondary flows; and (3) interfacial shear stress. An analytical solution in terms of series expansion is obtained for the case of constant eddy...

The most common approach to assess the safety of a bridge is load rating. However, this approach cannot quantify the bridge safety in probabilistic terms or fully quantify the structural risk to the bridge. Reliability methods have become an increasingly popular and gradually accepted approach to assess the safety of structures. These methods account for the randomness and correlation of all re...

In this paper, a data-mining approach for modeling pumps in the wastewater preliminary treatment process is discussed. Datamining algorithms are utilized to develop pump performance models based on industrial data collected at a municipal wastewater processing plant. The performance of wastewater pumps is described by two parameters, pump energy consumption and water flow rate after the pumps. ...