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Purpose -The increased need for, and maintenance of, infrastructure creates challenges for all agencies that manage infrastructure assets. To assist with these challenges, agencies implement asset management systems. This exploratory research investigated and compared the importance of barriers faced by agencies establishing transportation asset management systems in the US and Libya to contrast a case of a developed and developing country.Design/ methodology/approach -A literature review identified twenty-eight potential barriers for implementing an asset management system. Practitioners who participated in decisionmaking processes in each country were asked to rate the importance of each barrier in an online survey questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, Kendall Concordance W, and Mann-Whitney were used to analyze the collected data.Findings -Through an analysis of 61 completed questionnaires, 14 barriers were identified as important by both the US and Libyan practitioners. Eleven additional barriers, primarily in the areas of political and regulatory barriers, were determined to be important only for Libya. These 11 barriers provide reasonable insights into asset management systems' barriers for developing countries.Practical implications -The barriers identified from this research can assist decision makers to recognize and overcome these barriers when implementing asset management systems, while recognizing the importance of country conditions. Originality/ value -The research identified standard barriers to implementing asset management systems. It also identified barriers that were specific to the country context, such as political and regulatory barriers in Libya. When viewed with the asset management literature, the results show broad applicability of some asset management barriers and the need to contextualize to country context (e.g., developing countries) for other barriers.

Infrastructure around the world is deteriorating, particularly in developing countries, where systems for managing infrastructure assets are immature or nonexistent. Because of successful implementation of infrastructure asset management in developed countries, there are promising approaches to address the difficulties faced by developing countries’ infrastructure organizations and their managers. This paper presents an infrastructure asset management organizational model to help decision makers in developing countries explore the impact of various strategies on the organization’s performance in a variety of external conditions. These decisions will support managers in implementing infrastructure asset management in their organizations. The researchers first categorized countries into three classes according to external conditions: supportive, intermediate, or unsupportive environments. Then a cross-impact analysis model was applied to simulate the impacts of strategy alternatives, drivers, and processes on outcome measurements, given this variety of external conditions. The findings show that organizations in each class should focus on implementing a specific strategy correlating to the external variable’s conditions. For instance, organizations that work in an intermediate environment should build a strong communication networking strategy before investing in organizational support or organizational structure strategies.

Diesel generators are being used as a source of electricity in different parts of the world. Because of the significant expense in diesels cost and the requirement for a greener domain, such electric generating systems appear not to be efficient and environmentally friendly and should be tended to. This paper explores the attainability of utilizing a sustainable power source based on a cross-breed electric system in the cement factory in Salalah, Oman. The HOMER software that breaks down the system setup was utilized to examine the application and functional limitations of each hybridized plan. The result showed that a renewable-energy (RE)-based system has a lower cost of energy (COE) and net present cost (NPC) compared to diesel generator-based hybrid electric and standalone systems. Although the two pure renewable hybrid energy systems considered in this study displayed evidence of no emissions, lower NPC and COE values are observed in the photovoltaic/battery (PV/B) hybrid energy system compared with photovoltaic/wind turbine/battery (PV/WT/B). The PV/WT/B and PV/B systems have higher electricity production and low NPC and COE values. Moreover, the PV/B has the highest return on investment (ROI) and internal rate of return (IRR), making the system the most economically viable and adjudged to be a better candidate for rural community electrification demands.