Pipe risk management
Identify high-risk water and wastewater pipes, understand the impact of failure, and make confident decisions about replacement, rehabilitation, and monitoring across your system.
WHY PIPES FAIL
No two utility systems fail the same way. Pipe age, material, pressure, soil conditions, weather, break history, and many other variables can all influence failure risk depending on local system conditions.
Pipe Risk Management improves water main break prediction, and reduces failure rates, by analyzing the factors unique to each system, helping identify the mains most likely to need attention before failures occur.
BUSINESS RISK PREDICTION
Get ahead of meter issues before they create billing corrections, bill shock, and customer disputes. Support fair billing and protect customer trust with earlier visibility. When you know which meters need attention sooner, you can address issues earlier and reduce avoidable customer friction.
See pipe-level LOF rankings that show which assets are most likely to fail and where, so you can focus inspections, monitoring, and renewal review on the highest-risk areas first.
Understand the impact of a pipe failure based on critical locations, service disruption, repair complexity, nearby infrastructure, and community impact.
Identify which assets carry the highest overall risk by bringing Likelihood of Failure and Consequence of Failure together, then focus replacement, rehabilitation, inspection, or monitoring where action can reduce the most exposure.
FROM DATA TO DECISIONS
Use your utility data together with external risk factors to identify priority assets and guide clearer, more defensible infrastructure decisions.
Step 1
Use GIS records, pipe attributes, break history, location, and available system data as the foundation for pipe risk analysis.
Step 2
Identify high-risk mains and wastewater pipes, and understand why they may need attention sooner.
Step 3
Use risk insights to decide which pipes to replace, rehabilitate, inspect, or monitor first, and move from risk ranking to action faster.
WHO IT'S FOR
Pipe risk data is only useful when it helps teams make better decisions. Our software supports the planning, engineering, operations, and leadership workflows, utilities rely on to manage water and wastewater pipe renewal.
Prioritize renewal and rehabilitation projects based on risk
Prioritize pipes for condition assessment, rehab, renewal or logger placement based on pipe-level risk.
Check risk before field work and coordinate with road projects to reduce disruption.
Justify and communicate infrastructure needs with clearer evidence and confidence
“There is limited data to make expensive decisions around our pipe network. With VODA.ai’s machine learning technology, we are able to make smart decisions, save valuable resources, and protect our water infrastructure.”
Tim Thomure
City Manager
City of Tucson
CASE STUDY
Tucson Water was replacing pipes based on paving schedules–not actual condition–wasting time and capital.
Blog
Water meters are the financial backbone of any water utility. They track every gallon delivered, determine how much customers are…
Case Study
Plano is facing a growing challenge: over 110 miles of large-diameter water mains…
Webinar
The cost of misguided renewal. Join the webinar and learn from utility professional Scott Schweda, Arlington Heights.
Event
The Innovation Hub to learn how AI-driven risk prediction is delivering real world results for utilities across the US.
FAQ
AI is better for pipe failure prediction because it weighs many risk factors together – asset data, failure history, location, and environmental conditions – to surface the system-specific patterns that age-based or statistical methods miss. In one validation against a utility’s actual failures, machine learning correctly predicted 94% of main breaks (VODA.ai, Greenville Water).
Water main break prediction is the use of data and machine learning to identify which water mains are most likely to fail. It analyzes asset data, failure history, location, and other risk factors to rank pipes by likelihood of failure, so utilities can act before a break occurs.
Pipe risk management is the practice of ranking pipes by risk so utilities can prioritize the right response for each one. It combines Likelihood of Failure and Consequence of Failure to help teams decide where to replace, rehabilitate, inspect, or monitor — directing resources where action reduces the most risk.
No. Age and failure history matter, but they don’t tell the full story. Material, soil conditions, pressure, location, and consequence of failure all shape which pipes to prioritize. Multi-factor risk models weigh these together and rank pipes more accurately than age or history alone.
Pipe risk management supports capital planning by turning asset risk into clear, defensible project priorities. It helps utilities build risk-based replacement and rehabilitation plans, justify budgets with evidence, and align long-term capital investment with the highest-risk areas, so spending targets the pipes that reduce the most risk. Pipe risk management helps utilities translate asset risk into clearer project priorities, supporting risk-based replacement planning, budget justification, and long-term capital planning.
No. Utilities can start with the data they already have – GIS records, pipe attributes, failure history, and other existing system data – and improve planning confidence over time. Complete or perfect data is not required to produce useful pipe-level risk rankings.
Yes. Pipe Risk Management works for both water and wastewater utilities. It evaluates each pipe’s likelihood and consequence of failure, then helps teams prioritize replacement, rehabilitation, inspection, or monitoring – directing limited resources to the assets where action reduces the most risk across the network.
Identify high-risk water and wastewater assets, prioritize renewal decisions, and reduce the impact of unexpected pipe failures.
