Resilience-based asset management in Integrated Urban Wastewater System (IUWS)

Research Group

Future Cities Research Network

Proposed supervisory team

Dr Maryam Imani

Theme

Built Environment, Urban Resilience

Summary of the research project

Asset management in wastewater industry (sewer system and wastewater treatment plant) will require innovative approaches to effectively respond to emerging challenges and uncertainties in future cities. To date, multi-objective risk-based approaches (including operational risk, economic risk, social and environmental risks) have been extensively used and tested for asset management in wastewater industry. These approaches are often leading to fail-safe and reliability-based solutions. However, with growing challenges (climate change, population growth, aged assets, financial crisis and so on), wastewater industry will require to incorporate resilience-based approaches into its asset management process.

This study aims to contribute to this transform by developing a resilience-based asset management model to support the wastewater industry in future cities.

Some potential objectives of this project could be outlined as:

1. To investigate and identify the potential failure states (FSs) – or failure scenarios - of the assets in a wastewater system (regardless of their origins, all - hazards approach)
2. To define and develop global resilience measure(s) for the wastewater system performance
3. To integrate the above FSs and global resilience measure(s) to create a new resilience-based asset evaluation model
4. To test and evaluate the new model using a benchmark case-study
5. To determine the critical assets (condition assessment) using the new developed model
6. To define asset management criteria/objectives
7. To develop adaptation and mitigation strategies to manage the critical assets using the above criteria.

The project will involve a range of stakeholders including: water and wastewater industry (engineers, managers, operators, and regulators); urban planners, and county councils. The project will be desktop-based and will require specialist software/tools above what is currently available within the Faculty of Science and Engineering. There are potential organisations interested to join and collaborate.

Where you'll study

Chelmsford

Funding

This project is self-funded.

Details of studentships for which funding is available are selected by a competitive process and are advertised on our jobs website as they become available.

Next steps

If you wish to be considered for this project, we strongly advise you contact the proposed supervisory team. You will also need to formally apply for our Engineering and the Built Environment PhD. In the section of the application form entitled 'Outline research proposal', please quote the above title and include a research proposal.