Asset health modelling & resilience

Utility operators are under greater scrutiny to understand their operational resilience to service outages

The pressure is driven by recent weather extremes, rising demand for services, ageing infrastructure, high-profile incidents and evolving regulatory and consumer expectations.

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Optimise your asset health

Resilience comprises four components

Resistance

Ensuring the protection of physical, human and information assets from an external shock. This includes flood defences, health and safety initiatives and cyber security.

Reliability

Ensuring that systems and people operate in a stable and predictable way under different operating conditions. This includes competency-based training, climate change adaptation and effective preventative maintenance.

Redundancy

Ensuring that systems have sufficient capacity for critical functions. This includes backup energy generation alongside alternative water supply and wastewater disposal routes during equipment failures.

Response and recovery

Ensuring that operators have the resources available to respond quickly, safely and effectively to restore service. This includes resource and incident management and critical spares identification and maintenance.

With a moving target and standardisation some way off, the water sector, government and the supply chain are working hard to define what a resilient water sector looks like. Similar challenges exist in the energy and transport sectors; interdependency adds further complexity.

The importance of asset health and systems resilience

Physical, human and information assets do not operate in isolation. This drives a growing demand for better-quality evidence to enable operators to make informed, cost-effective investment decisions at a system level. This applies whether the focus is a water supply network, a sewer catchment or an entire supply grid.

Asset health is a cornerstone of operational resilience (Ofwat, June 2025). Therefore, a clear understanding of asset condition and performance under current and future scenarios is vital. This clarity defines the headroom in operational resilience over the relevant planning horizon. This horizon can span five or six years for regulatory cycles, or 25+ years when considering long-term environmental destinations.

How WRc can support your asset health and systems resilience

WRc experts authored several publications and guidance on understanding, measuring and assessing asset health. Our dedicated asset resilience team provides consultancy and modelling services to diagnose root causes of failure and evaluate asset health for investment plans.

We offer failure and deterioration modelling using statistical methods and supervised machine learning for all infrastructure asset classes. We also provide engineering reliability modelling for most water sector asset classes, including treatment processes.

We believe a one-size-fits-all compromise is rarely the best solution. Our products are software-agnostic, tailored to your requirements and built to operate within native client architecture or hosted through dedicated browser-based apps. We are supported in gathering evidence of asset health by our inspection, testing and environmental services team that conducts condition assessment and in-pipe inspections.

View our manuals and publications

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