Infrastructure management: Decision support and life cycle cost analysis

The continuous budget cuts and restructuring in many of today's governments trigger the need for optimally allocating budgets and resources to ensure long term value. This involves repairing infrastructures where they can be repaired, and replacing and expanding infrastructures as necessary in an optimum manner. An Infrastructure Management System (IMS) can play an important role in optimizing and justifying budget spending. Generally, the main objectives of IMS are to: I) provide access to infrastructure information through an integrated data repository and 2) prioritize maintenance, rehabilitation and construction needs and optimize spending to ensure life cycle maximum value. This paper consists of two main parts. The first part outlines the research and development efforts in Alberta, Canada for its transportation Infrastructure Management System. It presents the issues behind this major initiative along with the scope, architecture and components of the system. The second part discusses the issue of life cycle cost analysis and its application in infrastructure management. This includes the evaluation of infrastructure construction and rehabilitation alternatives, taking into considerations the uncertainty involved in determining the useful life of an infrastructure. The ability to determine the uncertainty values, which accompany the predicted life cycle costs, allows decision-makers to evaluate construction and rehabilitation alternatives with a good knowledge of the inherent risks.