Issues in Decision Support Tools for Sustainable Infrastructure Management

There has been considerable and well-documented concern about the current state of public infrastructure - roads, bridges, water and waste systems, etc. The causes of these challenges - (1) aging and deteriorating infrastructure; (2) inadequate funding; (3) competing organizational objectives; (4) questionable maintenance, repair, rehabilitation and replacement practices in the past; (5) demographic and population shifts; and (6) new understandings about sustainability objectives - are common to many government and utility owners. These challenges necessitate that the infrastructure industry excel at developing and managing its infrastructure systems to their maximum potential. To meet these needs, the infrastructure domain requires improvements to the decision support tools that currently exist for sustainable infrastructure management. This paper reviews this problem with a particular focus on the Canadian context, and outlines a course of action to address the current needs. The proposal addresses three domains in the field of sustainable infrastructure management. First, it builds on work to develop comprehensive techniques to assess the sustainability of infrastructure systems. Second, it attempts to advance multi-objective optimization techniques and tools for predicting the long-term performance of infrastructure systems and optimal strategies under a variety of maintenance regime alternatives. Third, it develops data interoperability solutions to create an infrastructure data integrator as a computing platform for this work.