Decision-support tools for municipal infrastructure maintenance management

Abstract

Sewers, water pipes, and streets are elements of our civil infrastructure, the supporting structure of society. Infrastructure is a complex technical system that provides us with a varied range of essential services; a storehouse of resources and wealth that each generation inherits, uses, and passes on to succeeding generations. The asset management has a big influence on infrastructure development and use: undertaken and executed without fully recognizing the complexity, diversity, and social and technological evolution of the system almost inevitably squander economic, environmental, social, and cultural resources. The challenges of managing these assets most effectively are substantial: the inefficiencies are widespread and really easy to see: jammed traffic on roads designed to carry only a fraction of the current demand, newly-resurfaced city streets open to repair aged subsurface pipes, basements flooded in case of insistent heavy rain, etc. In existing asset management systems often information is not efficiently used in decisional process, which results in much waste in time and effort. It is necessary to develop life-cycle management systems of infrastructure to overcome this problem. The system must integrate geographic information, design data, inspection and maintenance data. Emphasis is placed on development of decision-support tools for municipal infrastructure management. The study identifies the challenges for maintenance, repair and renewal planning faced by asset owners and managers. Integration with existing systems such as Computerized Maintenance Management Systems, Geographic Information Systems, is seen as the largest challenge for developing and using decisionsupport tools in the area of asset management.

Urban space maintainability factors based on life cycle approach

“…The maintenance process involves various resources and undertakes many procedures. Availability and management of such resources are imperative to ensure maintainability during the operational stage of urban facilities and utilities (Michele and Daniela, 2011).…”

“…The unique nature of the urban environment necessitates the study of maintainability (Okogbaa et al , 1986). For example, when several utilities share the same space, damaging the adjacent service line during maintenance could be minimized if the spaces are well-planned and designed at the early design stage (Michele and Daniela, 2011). On the other hand, combining multiple utility services into a single space is recommended for efficient maintenance and effective space utilization (Sterling et al , 2012).…”

Ontology-based modelling of lifecycle underground utility information to support operation and maintenance

“…However, as pointed out by [32], collecting quality data and modelling the data to support decisions for utility management remains a significant challenge. Furthermore, information in existing management systems is not sufficiently utilized to support decision making, and integrating data from different sources is still a problem [33]. Beck et al [34] proposed a framework to integrate underground utility data in the UK at the schema and semantic level, but the inspection and maintenance data were not incorporated and no decision support functions were developed, making the framework inadequate for utility maintenance and management.…”

Requirements for Big Data Adoption for Railway Asset Management

“…In terms of big data classification, structured, semi-structured and unstructured data are often classified under ''Content Format'' in terms of their characteristics [8]. For traditional asset management systems, data selection is known to be very sensitive (and important) as all the future analyses and subsequent planning are to be performed based on the data stored in the asset management database [25]. Hence, the quality and reliability of the transferred data represent one of the crucial issues and keys to the success of any railway asset management system in use.…”