Automation model of sewerage rehabilitation planning

The major steps of sewerage rehabilitation include inspection of sewerage, assessment of structural conditions, computation of structural condition grades, and determination of rehabilitation methods and materials. Conventionally, sewerage rehabilitation planning relies on experts with professional background that is tedious and time-consuming. This paper proposes an automation model of planning optimal sewerage rehabilitation strategies for the sewer system by integrating image process, clustering technology, optimization, and visualization display. Firstly, image processing techniques, such as wavelet transformation and co-occurrence features extraction, were employed to extract various characteristics of structural failures from CCTV inspection images. Secondly, a classification neural network was established to automatically interpret the structural conditions by comparing the extracted features with the typical failures in a databank. Then, to achieve optimal rehabilitation efficiency, a genetic algorithm was used to determine appropriate rehabilitation methods and substitution materials for the pipe sections with a risk of mal-function and even collapse. Finally, the result from the automation model can be visualized in a geographic information system in which essential information of the sewer system and sewerage rehabilitation plans are graphically displayed. For demonstration, the automation model of optimal sewerage rehabilitation planning was applied to a sewer system in east Taichung, Chinese Taiwan.