Future water infrastructure planning continues to require stricter requirements in delivering asset resilience across asset management decision-making practices globally. What does long-term resiliency really mean in the future? How can the water utilities change the way they plan, invest and operate their services in order to meet the long-term interests of current and future customers, the environment, and wider society? In the water industry, there is a lack of understanding of how to consistently measure the resilience of water supply which would ensure the customers and the environment are protected in the longer term. Facing a significant supply deficit caused by several factors including climate change, population growth, regulatory changes and legacy issues of aging existing infrastructure will require substantial capital and operational interventions in the day-to-day operation and during drought. In 2021 we formed a resilience forum with 5 of the largest water companies in the UK to define the challenges in better defining and optimizing asset resilience. Based on that work, a Resilience Optimization Framework was established that will enable utilities to evaluate the long-term resilience of a system, in parallel with minimizing cost and meeting standard performance criteria. The challenge is complex – assessing the required additional water treatment plants, additional pipelines, pumping stations and reservoirs to improve resilience via a hydraulic model, modeling water quality and associated required asset solutions for treatment, while designing to water utility standards and improving customer levels of service. Optimization with hydraulic performance, cost, and impact on customers from different interventions allow users to quantify the level of Risk and Resilience thoroughly. One of the significant benefits of applying the framework is allowing users to include all possible indicators as well as explore all possible options to identify the best trade-off between cost and risk. The framework contains a 7-step methodology, and it assists, navigates, and prepares the users to implement and adapt the methodology to their own resilience assessment. The OptimizerTM framework is created to be flexible, adaptable, and robust to accommodate all ranges and scales of projects globally. It is quite complex to measure resiliency since it is a flexible measure, and traditionally one standard cannot necessarily be applied to all cases. For that reason, when the water utilities undertake a task of prioritizing for resilient infrastructure planning, the process tends to get simplified and looks for the least level of failure or simply a risk ranking rather than exploring all possible key indicators. This framework has been used in evaluating risk and value of projects in governance processes as input to demonstrate the breadth of the analysis to all stakeholders.
