Wastewater asset management at the city of Edmonton, Alberta

Currently, municipalities are being tasked to develop improved systematic methodology for allotting their period budgets more appropriately so that their installed buried infrastructure is better utilized and sustained. While capital is typically spent on new infrastructure construction, the maintenance of the present infrastructure must not be neglected. When planning the allocation of investment funds, multiple objectives may exist which are dependent on the constraints, resources available for construction, and the interrelationships and dependencies among all of the alternatives. This makes the task of planning, prioritizing, and allocating funds a complex exercise. In 2000, the City of Edmonton, Alberta initiated a proactive approach to maintaining their wastewater assets by developing a financial outlay model called Proactive Rehabilitative Sewer Infrastructure Management (PRISM). PRISM uses linear programming to optimize allocation of funding for the local sewer network based on deterioration predictive modeling. A more robust version of PRISM was developed in 2002 and has been implemented into the City's asset planning strategy. This paper discusses the City of Edmonton's approach to asset management including assessment of the past five years and describes the framework of PRISM.