Water Supply Infrastructure Cost Modelling

The current paper presents the development and validation of cost functions for different types of assets of water supply systems based on known hydraulic (e.g., flow, pump head, pump power) and physical characteristics of the assets (e.g., volume, material, nominal diameter). The followed methodology is a five-step procedure: 1) database construction and analysis, 2) present cost value calculation, 3) cost function establishment, 4) model specification, and 5) model validation. Cost and infrastructure data from several Portuguese water utilities have been used. Regression models have been used for the cost modelling.