CASE-BASED REASONING APPROACH FOR MANAGING WATER QUALITY INCIDENTS IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Access to safe drinking water is universally considered as a fundamental human right and customers regard a reliable supply of safe, clean water as the most important aspect of the water supply service. However, water quality failures do occur, with some of the hardest to understand and manage occurring within distribution systems. In the UK, a regulatory process is applied in which water companies must report on significant water quality incidents, their causes, actions, responses, and outcomes. The Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) assesses these reports on an annual basis and their findings are made publically available. It is hypothesized here that these reports form a valuable resource that can be ‘data mined ’ for improved understanding and to help with future incident management. A software tool, called WaterQualityCBR, has been developed for this purpose. This methodology can support decision-making for water utilities in managing drinking water incidents