(Jeff Muscarella, Jorge Cueto, Matthew McGrath, 1989)
Public works such as the Dallas Water Utilities need to stretch their capital resource budgets as far as possible in order to give the best service to the community. In order to keep their costs down, the Dallas Water Utilities has a need to know when worn-out pipes need replacing.
The purpose of our project was to find a scientific and reliable method of predicting areas of the city that will need water main system replacement in the future. By analyzing data provided on past water main breaks, we attempted to identify any trends in previous pipe breaks which could tell us about where pipes will break in the coming years. Although our analysis clearly defined certain trends in the past water main breaks, our study found that in order to obtain results beneficial to the DWU (Dallas Water Utilities) it would be necessary to conduct a more in-depth analysis. This second analysis involves dividing the city into sectors and gathering information on all of the pipes in that sector, both pipes with breaks and those without breaks. The experiment then analyzes the new data and determines the pipes in certain areas most likely to break which is the desired result.