Assessment of Renewal Priority of Water Pipeline Network against Earthquake Risk

Long-term outage of drinking water supply after earthquakes has large adverse impacts on the lives of residents and cities’ water supply systems. Priority assessment is required to determine the effective order of preparing the measures against these hazards. Previous studies have insufficiently focused on the effects of seismic resistance of core pipelines, thereby affecting all the other branched pipelines that supply the water to each residential area. In our research, we aimed to propose the appropriate order of core pipelines derived from the center of the water treatment plants in Osaka, Japan against the Nankai Trough earthquake. Solutions that cause less damage have been needed because natural disaster prediction has had a lot of uncertainty. We proposed indices that can evaluate an appropriate renewal plan that considers the damage of core pipelines of water and the renewal cost for core pipeline networks based on the scenario analysis and the Monte Carlo simulation. The amount of water distribution of core pipelines in each area is the top priority when renewing them in terms of cost-effectiveness and expected rate of water outage under the disaster.