A Multicriteria Approach Using MAUT to Assist the Maintenance of a Water Supply System Located in a Low-Income Community

Public services for low‐income communities located in developing countries have shortcomings in their infrastructure, which very often result from the lack of capacity to supply water to all clients simultaneously. Because of this, in these regions maintenance activity becomes more important because besides the limited capacity, the losses of supply or availability due to system failures further increase the number of hours during which service to the whole community is interrupted. Given this problem, this article proposes a multi‐criteria decision model based on MAUT for the planning of preventive maintenance in cases like this, and considers that besides costs, keeping the system available is an objective. The contribution of this paper is to present a model for a real and common problem in developing countries, besides the results found through the case study. By applying the model proposed in a case study in a low‐income community in Brazil, it was possible to identify a maintenance policy that seeks to increase the efficiency of the system which can be achieved by making the increase in availability and minimizing cost compatible.