Due to structural and hydraulic deterioration, urban water pipe networks have annual rehabilitation needs. Worldwide, these needs are often significantly larger than the actual amount of rehabilitation being performed, leading to increased risks of serious failures, lower performance and a growing techno-financial burden for future generations. It is well accepted that, in order to limit the multiple impacts of utility works in the urban environment, rehabilitation projects should be coordinated between water, transport, energy and telecommunication infrastructures. In practice, such coordination means that public utilities must rehabilitate assets earlier or later than technically needed, in order to engage in joint projects in which digging and resurfacing expenditures are shared. Hence, at the municipal scale, such coordination influences two variables that are key to strategic decision support: average costs (€/metre) for asset rehabilitation, and the service lifetimes of those assets. However, current models for strategic asset management do not enable practitioners to estimate how changes in the coordination process may influence the long-term financial and environmental impacts of infrastructure rehabilitation. The present study aimed at addressing this methodological gap by introducing the concept of a coordination window that quantifies to what extent utilities compromise asset rehabilitation times in order to join multi-utility projects. An algorithm for modelling the influence of the coordination window size on long-term sustainability costs is presented and applied to one Swedish municipality. The results suggested that total capital costs and carbon emissions can be lowered by 34% and 16% with a coordination window of 35 and 25 year, in comparison to the no-coordination case.

Urban water, sewer, and road infrastructures are simultaneously facing renewal demands, necessitating more cost-efficient rehabilitation strategies. Coordinating interventions across co-located assets can lower long-term expenditures, yet strategic-level modelling approaches remain limited. This study evaluates two such methods: joint cohort survival analysis (JCSA), which models either separate or systematic coordination, and the multi-utility rehabilitation modeller (MURM), which introduces a coordination window to represent intermediate policies. Both methods were applied to residential street cohorts constructed in Luleå, Sweden, during 1965–1975. The results indicate that JCSA and MURM produce consistent outcomes under no-coordination and systematic coordination scenarios. In contrast, under moderate coordination, MURM predicts substantially lower accumulated capital costs (€50.5 m) than JCSA (€58.8 m), corresponding to a 12–17% reduction. These findings demonstrate the analytical advantages of MURM for strategic asset management, offering decision-makers a more realistic representation of coordination policies and their long-term financial implications.

Long term planning methodologies for sewer and water mains rehabilitation play a key role in water infrastructure asset management by enabling modelling the influence of renewal strategies on various sustainability indicators. Long term rehabilitation scenarios defining annual replacement rates are typically compared in order to choose the best strategy for the sewer and drinking water network, separately. Another important factor for long term rehabilitation planning is the share of replacement work that will be coordinated with other infrastructures (e.g. water network for the sewer network and vice versa, roads, etc.). This reduces linear replacement costs but also shortens the service life of pipes replaced for coordination reason. The paper proposes an integrated methodology to evaluate the impact of different coordination strategies on future replacement costs for water and sewer networks renewal. The method is applied on a newly built residential area in the town of Gällivare in Sweden.

This study presents an integrated sustainability assessment of technical alternatives for water and heating services provision in suburban areas affected by a cold climate. Each alternative combines a drinking water supply, sewerage (gravity or low-pressure), pipe freeze protection (deep burial or shallow burial with heat tracing) and heating solution (district heating or geothermal heat pumps). An innovative freeze protection option was considered, in which low-temperature district heating (LTDH) is used to heat trace shallow sewer and water pipes. First, the performance of each alternative regarding seven sustainability criteria was evaluated on a projected residential area in Sweden using a systems analysis approach. A multi-criteria method was then applied to propose a sustainability ranking of the alternatives based on a set of weights obtained from local stakeholders. The alternative with a deep buried gravity sewer and geothermal heat pumps was found to have the highest sustainability score in the case study. In the sensitivity analysis, the integrated trench solution with a gravity sewer, innovative heat tracing and LTDH was found to potentially top the sustainability ranking if geothermal energy was used as the district heating source, or if the weight of the cost criterion increased from 24% to 64%. The study highlights the need for integrated decision-making between different utility providers as an integrated solution can represent sustainability gains.

Heat-traced utility corridors (utilidors) can be used in cold regions to install the drinking water and sewer pipes in a shallow trench above the frost depth, thereby limiting excavation needs and the associated economic, social, and environmental costs. Several of these infrastructures were built in the 60s and 70s in Canada, Alaska, Russia, and Norway. More recently, a new type of heat-traced utilidor was built as a pilot project in Kiruna, Sweden to increase the viability of district heating in the area by allowing co-location of all the utility pipes in a shallow trench. Despite several reported cases of undesirably warm drinking water from full-scale projects, previous research efforts on heat-traced utilidors have mainly focused on pipe freeze protection, not on the prevention of excessive temperatures of the drinking water. To ensure comfortable drinking water in terms of taste and smell, an upper temperature limit of 15 °C is usually recommended. The objective of this study was to evaluate the long-term ability of a heat-traced utilidor to maintain sewer temperatures above 0 °C and drinking water temperatures between 0 and 15 °C. Pipe temperatures were measured continuously at two cross sections of a heat-traced utilidor located in Northern Sweden over a period of 22 months. A thermal model, set up and calibrated on the measurements, was used to simulate the impact of extraordinary cold weather conditions on the pipes’ temperatures. The results showed that the utilidor could keep the pipe temperatures within the desired ranges in most cases but that special care should be taken during design to limit drinking water temperatures during the summer.

The burial of sewer and water pipes below the maximum ground frost depth can be very costly and laborious in regions with cold winters. If a freeze protection measure is applied, the utility lines can be installed in a shallower trench to reduce the excavation needs. One freeze protection measure, so called heat tracing, consists in supplying heat along the pipes. In this work, the use of 4th generation district heating as a heat tracing solution was investigated at a pilot site in Kiruna, Sweden. The influence of the system on sewer and water pipe temperatures was studied at a snow-free and snow-covered cross section. To this end, five heat tracing temperatures were tested and the corresponding sewer and water pipe temperatures were measured. The field experiment was also simulated with a two dimensional finite volume model. The study showed that, under the climatic conditions of the experiment, a heat tracing temperature of 25 °C allowed to prevent freezing of the pipes while keeping drinking water pipes in a safe temperature range at both cross sections. The other main result was that the developed finite volume model of the sections showed a good fitting to the experimental data