Investigating the USACE Operational Condition Assessment process current and future

Abstract

The US Army Corps of Engineers operates, maintains, and manages more than $232 billion worth of the Nation’s water resource infrastructure and relies on the Operational Condition Assessment (OCA) process to determine the condition of the assets and their components. The sheer number of components, all of equal OCA scheduling priority, creates challenges in ensuring that assessments are conducted in a timely manner and that data generated are of sufficient quality to inform resource allocation decisions. This research applied methods from systems design to determine the OCA system “as-is” state and create a stakeholder-informed vision of a “to-be” state that addresses current system challenges. To meet its objective of providing current assessments of asset condition, the OCA system must provide four high-level functions: provide access to asset data, conduct assessments, determine asset risk, and prioritize and schedule assessments. The development of capabilities to provide these functions will facilitate the achievement of the OCA system to-be vision: a consistent view of asset condition and risk across the enterprise.

Risk-based prioritization of operational condition assessments : methodology and case study results

“…This section provided an overview of the methodology, as well as variations on the methodology, that was developed for this effort (Alt et al, n.d., 2021;Brown and Alt, 2021). The methodology is intended to be robust to different data sources and provide a framework for developing risk measures for FRM facilities across the enterprise.…”

“…USACE personnel perform operational condition assessments (OCAs) on these assets' components at a minimum of every 5 years. Having investigated the OCA system, the team recommended strategic objectives to achieve a transparent, consistent, and traceable risk-based OCA system (see Figure 1) (Brown and Alt 2021). This research develops a methodology to understand how the condition of components impacts system performance and how each system impacts the performance of the facility in which it sits.…”