Value of Information for Sewer Replacement Decisions

Value of Information for Sewer Replacement Decisions

Van Riel, W.A.P.
Langeveld, J.G.
Herder, P.M.
Clemens, F.H.L.R.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Water Management

2014-12-31

Decision-making for sewer asset management is partially based on intuition and often lacks explicit argumentation, hampering decision transparency and reproducibility. It is unknown to what extent each information source is appreciated by decision makers. Further insight into this relative importance and into implicit factors, improves understanding of decision-making of sewer system managers. As such, a digital questionnaire (response ratio 43%), containing pairwise comparisons between ten relevant information sources, was sent to every municipality in the Netherlands to analyse the relative importance and assess whether a shared frame of reasoning is present. Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment was used for analysis, combined with several consistency tests. Results show that camera inspections were valued highest, while pipe age was considered least important. The respondents were pretty consistent per individual and also showed consistency as a group. This indicated a common framework of reasoning among the group. The feedback of the group showed, however, the respondents found it difficult to make general comparisons without having a context. This indicates decision-making in practice is more likely to be steered by other mechanisms than purely combining information sources.

sewer asset management
decision-making
information
paired comparisons
consistency

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:56a2e0a9-3bd4-4c3d-a2c9-ad48aba6d39c

13th IWA/IAHR International Conference on Urban Drainage, Sarawak, Malaysia, 7-12 September 2014

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2014 The Author(s)