Know what each failure will truly cost—before it happens.
Cost of Failure (COF)
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Who It's For
Utility executives, asset managers, and consulting engineers who need to plan infrastructure investments with confidence — not just by likelihood of failure, but by the real-world impact of each break.
While LOF shows where breaks are most likely to occur, COF shows which ones will hurt the most. For leaders balancing performance, budget, and public accountability, COF brings clarity to which projects deliver the greatest value — and which failures would cause the most disruption.
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What It Is
Cost of Failure (COF) quantifies the consequences of a pipe failure in financial, operational, and social terms.
Where traditional models stop at physical condition, COF measures the broader impact — dollars lost, customers affected, traffic disrupted, and critical facilities compromised.
Each pipe segment receives a score representing the modeled total cost of failure. This includes direct costs like repair and replacement, and indirect costs such as service interruption, emergency response, water loss, and community disruption.
COF gives utilities a clear, defensible way to identify which failures truly matter — transforming asset management from reactive maintenance to informed, impact-based planning.
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Why Utilities Use It
Plan with Impact in Mind
Two pipes may have the same LOF, but vastly different consequences if they fail. A 6-inch main under a residential side street might cost $9,000 to repair. The same pipe near a hospital could trigger $75,000+ in damages, emergency response costs, and public safety risks.
COF makes those differences visible — helping utilities replace or reinforce the pipes that would cause the greatest harm.Quantify What’s at Stake
Fracta’s COF analysis evaluates surrounding land use, population density, traffic flow, customer type, and nearby critical facilities to estimate total failure costs.
The result is a comprehensive model that reflects how your network actually interacts with its environment — not just the pipes themselves.Prioritize with Confidence
By integrating LOF and COF, utilities can target investment where risk and consequence intersect. Even if data quality is imperfect, COF provides a transparent, data-backed foundation for prioritization — one that withstands scrutiny from boards, regulators, and auditors.
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How It Works
Fracta’s Cost of Failure model combines engineering logic with advanced machine learning to estimate the real-world consequence of a pipe break — in dollars, service disruption, and community impact.
It starts by analyzing your existing asset data — pipe material, diameter, installation year, and location — then layers in external datasets such as land use, traffic volume, population density, and proximity to critical facilities. Each of these factors influences what a break would cost and how disruptive it would be.
Fracta’s AI engine then evaluates how those variables interact, training on thousands of historical break events from utilities across the country. Through this process, the model learns the patterns of costly failures — identifying which combinations of conditions lead to the biggest impacts.
The result is a COF score for every pipe segment, expressed as a continuous, data-driven estimate of potential cost and consequence. This score can be visualized directly in your GIS system, allowing managers and engineers to see — at a glance — where failures would cause the most financial or operational harm.
Over time, as utilities add new data and record new failures, Fracta’s COF model continues to recalibrate and improve, keeping risk predictions aligned with evolving system realities
Cost of Failure Model
The COF Scenario Builder gives utilities full control over how failure consequences are defined and weighted. Every system is unique — so Fracta’s platform allows users to tailor the Cost of Failure model to reflect their community’s priorities, infrastructure, and operating environment.
Users can toggle and adjust both direct and indirect cost factors to match local realities.
Direct costs represent immediate financial impacts such as excavation, repair, and replacement.
Indirect costs capture broader consequences — property damage, environmental impact, service outages, traffic disruption, and effects on nearby critical facilities.
Each factor can be switched on, off, or calibrated to align with utility-specific assumptions and cost data. The result is a transparent, customizable model that mirrors how your organization defines “risk” — whether your focus is minimizing customer disruptions, protecting critical infrastructure, or managing repair budgets.
With COF Scenario Customization, utilities can run multiple “what-if” analyses, compare planning strategies, and understand how changing assumptions — like traffic density or customer sensitivity — shifts overall risk exposure. It transforms consequence modeling from a static calculation into a living, interactive decision-support tool.
COF Map Visualization
The COF Map provides an instant, system-wide view of which assets are most critical — and which failures would have the greatest impact. Each pipe segment is color-coded by its Cost of Failure (COF) score, allowing utilities to visualize risk across their entire network at a glance.
Red segments represent the areas of highest consequence — mains that, if they fail, would cause significant service disruption, costly repairs, or impacts to critical facilities and major transportation corridors. Greens and yellows indicate lower-consequence assets, where a failure would have a more limited effect.
This map transforms complex modeling into a simple, intuitive visual. It helps engineers, planners, and decision-makers quickly identify which assets truly matter most and where investment will have the greatest return in reliability, safety, and customer satisfaction.
Whether used for capital planning, emergency response, or long-term infrastructure strategy, the COF Map brings clarity to consequence — turning hundreds of data points into a clear picture of system vulnerability and priority.