Prediction of Sewer Pipe Deterioration Using Random Forest Classification
This work addresses the challenge of cost-effective inspection and maintenance planning for sewer infrastructure, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a specific domain.
The study tackled the problem of predicting sewer pipe deterioration by developing a random forest classification model, which achieved an area under the ROC curve of 0.81 in a case study for the City of LA, indicating excellent predictive performance.
Wastewater infrastructure systems deteriorate over time due to a combination of physical and chemical factors. Failure of this significant infrastructure could affect important social, environmental, and economic impacts. Furthermore, recognizing the optimized timeline for inspection of sewer pipelines are challenging tasks for the utility managers and other authorities. Regular examination of sewer networks is not cost-effective due to limited time and high cost of assessment technologies and a large inventory of pipes. To avoid such obstacles, various researchers endeavored to improve infrastructure condition assessment methodologies to maintain sewer pipe systems at the desired condition. Sewer condition prediction models are developed to provide a framework to forecast the future condition of pipes to schedule inspection frequencies. The main goal of this study is to develop a predictive model for wastewater pipes using random forest classification. Predictive models can effectively predict sewer pipe condition and can increase the certainty level of the predictive results and decrease uncertainty in the current condition of wastewater pipes. The developed random forest classification model has achieved a stratified test set false negative rate, the false positive rate, and an excellent area under the ROC curve of 0.81 in a case study application for the City of LA, California. An area under the ROC curve > 0.80 indicates the developed model is an "excellent" choice for predicting the condition of individual pipes in a sewer network. The deterioration models can be used in the industry to improve the inspection timeline and maintenance planning.