Major shifts in the competitive environment encouraged a recent growth in the number of academic articles devoted to strategic aspects of asset management. Organizations start to recognize that a strategic approach to asset management becomes a source of sustainable competitive advantages and long-term survival in the turbulent environment. However, existing studies are largely case-specific in interpreting strategy and draw on various theoretical grounds and approaches. This leads to little theoretical and methodological consistency in understanding current findings and how to design future studies. The key goal of this paper is to systematically review the existing research through the analysis of over 700 articles devoted to asset management with a focus on strategic aspects. Our key contributions are positioning strategic asset management within the vast field of asset management research, describing the nature of strategic asset management research, and confirming that asset management strategies align with different levels of organizational strategy. We visualize the existing research field, and indicate gaps and underdeveloped areas of research. We also shortly outline future research directions based on our findings, thus encouraging a more coherent development of research on strategic asset management.

Strategic Aspects of Asset Management: An Overview of Current Research

Multi-objective optimization for pavement maintenance and rehabilitation decision-making: A critical review and future directions

Assessment of the current state and prediction of the future condition of deteriorating structures are crucial processes in management of civil infrastructure systems. Not only time-varying loads and resistances but also a series of maintenance interventions that are applied to keep structural systems safe and serviceable make the prediction process very difficult. In order to perform a realistic life-cycle analysis of deteriorating structures under various maintenance scenarios the uncertainties involved in this process have to be considered. This paper considers these uncertainties by providing a reliability-based framework and shows that the identification of the optimum maintenance scenario is a straightforward process. This is achieved by using a computer program for Life-Cycle Analysis of Deteriorating Structures (LCADS). This program can consider the effects of various types of actions on the reliability index profile of a group of deteriorating structures. Only the effect of maintenance interventions is considered in this work. However, any environmental or mechanical action affecting the reliability index profile can be considered in LCADS. Most input data is represented by random variables. In this manner, uncertainties included in maintenance interventions, reliability index profiles, and cost evaluations are all taken into account. The present value of the expected cumulative cost associated with maintenance interventions can be evaluated for both an individual structure and a group of similar structures. Optimization and parametric analysis modules help the identification of the maintenance strategy that best balance cost and reliability index profile over a specified time horizon. Numerical examples of deteriorating bridges are presented to illustrate the capability of the proposed approach. Further development and implementation of this approach are recommended for future study.

Life-cycle reliability-based maintenance cost optimization of deteriorating structures with emphasis on bridges

In pavement management systems, it is beneficial to consider the economies of scale stemming from the synchronization of repairs conducted on neighboring sections within a single work zone. However, finding the globally optimal solution of the repair and work zone policy for a large-scale pavement network along a long-term planning horizon can be computationally cumbersome. In this study, as a benchmark, we first propose an exact solution algorithm based on dynamic programming. Then we second propose a computationally feasible methodology, a time-invariant simplified rule, to determine desirable (near-optimal) policies. The proposed methodology is applied to two numerical studies: (i) Case 1 for a small-scale road pavement system to compare life cycle costs and computational times between the rule-based methodology and the exact solution algorithm, and (ii) Case 2 for a real-scale road pavement system to discuss the effectiveness of the rule-based methodology. In Case 1, the rule-based methodology derives a near-optimal solution with a significantly shorter computational time than the exact solution algorithm. Case 2 shows that the rule-based methodology can find a superior policy to the aggregation of the optimal solutions independently found for each of decomposed sub-systems in a feasible computational time. Through sensitivity analyses, we find that the repair and work zone policies should vary depending on the deterioration process, cost factors, and weight between agency and user costs for society’s view or available budget for the agency’s perspective.

Network-level synchronized pavement repair and work zone policies: Optimal solution and rule-based approximation

Project Level Management Decisions in Construction and Rehabilitation of Flexible Pavements

Infrastructure assets, serving everyone’s daily life, are an essential foundation of any society. Their management faces a wide range of challenges. Hence optimization methods are increasingly applied to assist making management decisions in infrastructure asset management (IAM). A large number of articles apply a broad range of optimization methods in their decision making (DM) and achieve great results. However, they mainly focus on individual methods and a comprehensive knowledge, given the broad range of optimization methods, is hardly discussed. Hence it is valuable to analyze and graphically present the existing knowledge on this subject. This paper, based on a total of 337 articles, provides an overall review of the applications of optimization when making management decisions in IAM, with the intension of enhancing the optimization application and method selection and guiding the future research in this field. More specifically, this paper introduces the application process of optimization when assisting DM in IAM, summarizes the previous application research, and discusses the popular optimization methods applied in DM in IAM. According to the literature review, this paper confirms optimization can effectively assist DM in IAM and a wide range of optimization methods are applicable to assist a variety of DM problems. The recommendations on the applications and selection of optimization methods in the context of IAM are also made to facilitate the applications.

Qiang Bai

Papers

Optimization in Decision Making in Infrastructure Asset Management: A Review