Looking at the “very poor” condition bucket of the Deighton Water Model, the amount of investment (water) needed to restore it to “very good” condition is tremendous.
It’s not the situation that a municipal engineer or a highway engineer would want to be working.
Aside from dealing with the technical aspect, the infrastructure management team will also be dealing with dissatisfied ratepayers for the service that very poor assets are providing.
Moreover, working on restoring these very poor condition assets to very good status is like chasing an uncontrollable bushfire, you’ll never catch up to put it out.
The Deighton Water Model demonstration has shown clearly the logic behind optimized decision-making. This principle forms the basis of the Deighton dTIMS software that helps infrastructure management practitioners deal with infrastructure maintenance in good and fair condition level.
One factor that hinders infrastructure asset management professionals to give emphasis on infrastructure at “fair and poor condition” level (optimization area) is the less obvious need. The assets still look very functional. In many cases, the “very poor” assets get attended to because the need is tremendous and everyone is complaining.
Some city and municipal councilors would hesitate to appropriate funds for repairing infrastructure, like roads because they could see there’s nothing wrong with it.
Road users themselves, they would make an ocular inspection and would recommend maintaining it after two to five years. This could be a wrong decision especially if they wanted to enjoy using infrastructure assets for longer.
Running around fighting bushfires might feel satisfying for some city and municipal officials and engineers because you’re busy doing something, fixing an immediate problem on the very poor condition infrastructure.
However, Optimized Decision-Making offers longer-term view and from an engineering point of view, a far better solution. When you are maintaining assets at “fair and good” condition levels (2nd and 3rd buckets), you are in fact lengthening and sustaining their usability, thereby compensating for the investments spent.
Watching the Deighton Water Model demonstration video will enable the viewer to think about the advantages of Optimized Decision Making in terms of infrastructure life and maintenance cost.
If you want any more information about this model just click on the links below that will take you to additional information.
[…] response to this, this paper presents the importance of using optimisation tools in defining long and medium terms maintenance […]