Decision-support tools for municipal infrastructure maintenance management

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.