Corrosion is still the most common contributor to failures in Water Distribution Networks (WDNs), causing detrimental techno-socio-economic impacts. Although the corrosion process has been the subject of several studies, factors influencing this process remain a source of contention due to the complexity of the process and its influence by the surrounding environment. Considering the prior reviews, this comprehensive review is considered an early attempt to thoroughly cover the most influential corrosion factors in water pipelines. Corrosion factors have been classified into three main categories: 1) environmental factors; soil factors, external factors, and stray current factors; 2) pipe-related factors, and 3) operational factors. A fault tree analysis diagram was used to map, discuss, and analyze all significant corrosion causes of the buried water pipelines to facilitate easy visualization from basic factors to their intermediate and parent factors. Furthermore, the techno-socio-economic impacts of corrosion on water pipelines and beyond are appropriately addressed to demonstrate the issue’s multi-dimensional importance. The research is expanded to rank these factors using the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process to provide a better understanding of the currently focused research investigation and to enable the extraction of gaps and existing limitations in scholarly literature. The findings revealed that water quality is the most investigated factor, followed by electrical infrastructure and soil quality. Conversely, operational factors exhibit the greatest relative weight (0.428), followed by environmental factors (0.337). These findings highlight areas where further research is needed, and the article proposes potential directions for future studies to address these gaps.

腐蚀仍然是导致配水网络 (WDN) 故障的最常见原因，造成有害的技术社会经济影响。尽管腐蚀过程已成为多项研究的主题，但由于该过程的复杂性及其受周围环境的影响，影响该过程的因素仍然是争论的焦点。考虑到之前的审查，这次全面审查被认为是彻底涵盖输水管道中最有影响力的腐蚀因素的早期尝试。腐蚀因素主要分为三大类：1）环境因素；土壤因素、外界因素、杂散电流因素；2) 管道相关因素，以及 3) 操作因素。故障树分析图用于绘制、讨论、分析埋地输水管道的所有重要腐蚀原因，以便于从基本因素到中间因素和母因素的可视化。此外，腐蚀对输水管道及其他领域的技术、社会、经济影响得到了适当的解决，以证明该问题的多维重要性。该研究扩展到使用模糊层次分析过程对这些因素进行排序，以更好地理解当前重点研究调查，并能够提取学术文献中的差距和现有局限性。研究结果显示，水质是调查最多的因素，其次是电力基础设施和土壤质量。相反，操作因素的相对权重最大 (0.428)，其次是环境因素 (0.337)。