A Decision-Support Methodology for Asset Management

Managing infrastructure assets represents several challenges and requires an interesting array of resources. Any management strategy requires an estimation of the potential degradation of an asset over its life cycle, an analysis of the impact from asset failure and a set of actions (e.g., maintenance, replacement). An important Research and Development project (Alpha) performed by Harfan Technologies Inc. was aimed at developing advanced approaches and algorithms to address those challenges. The investigation of asset behavior over a specific timeframe led to consider the Reliability Theory to model the asset failure risk. In practice, asset failure rates or reliability distributions are not well known. Consequently, it is of interest to propose a methodology that estimates the empirical reliability of an asset based on historical data. The asset reliability distribution was then used to address asset management problem. Three fundamental management problems were identified: Micro-management (segment level analysis), Macro-management (network level analysis) and Strategic management (integrated asset management).