Failure of a pipe or valve in a water distribution system causes service disruption and other inconveniences to the customers at or downstream of the failure location. To minimize the impact of such a pipe or valve failure, it is crucial to identify those pipes or valves whose failure will have...

This paper presents applications of the log-linear ROCOF and the power law process to model the failure rate and estimate the economically optimal replacement time of the individual pipes in a water distribution system. The performance of the two failure rate models is examined using the...