Asset Management Strategies for District Heating Networks

District Heating (DH) became widely adopted in European cities during the 20th century to meet demand for heating from a growing urban population. Today, the desire to decarbonize Europe's heat consumption has lead to an renewed interest in increasing the adoption of DH. To meet this end, DH has to be a price competitive alternative to other heating technologies. Over time the underground heat distribution network that DH companies operate suffers from faults that require replacement of pipes. On-demand replacement is more expensive than planned large scale replacement projects. The only question is, when is the optimal time to renew the pipes? In this article this question will be formulated using Reliability Theory. Our approach is to use historical records of time to failure and a bounding result to estimate the optimal time for replacement. The method can be used by DH companies with historical fault records to form an Asset Management strategy on the question of when to renew which pipes.